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PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS

OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF OWNERSHIP IN
ARCHAIC COMMUNITIES

PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS

OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF OWNERSHIP
IN ARCHAIC COMMUNITIES

E. J. SIMCOX

AUTHOR OF " NATURAL LAW," ETC

VOLUME I

SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO

NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO

1894

BUTLER & TANNER

THE SELWOOD PRINTING WORKS

FROME AND LONDON

Cfr

i/; /

To J. H. S.

In correcting these volumes for the press,
you will have observed, Sweet Heart, that
great part of the wisdom of the Egyptians
and the wisdom of the Chaldceans, not to
speak of the Chinese or other ancient nations,
lay in this : that they thought miich of mothers.
To whom, then, but yoii can I dedicate these
echoes of world-old humanity > gathered to show
by what habits and forbearances the sons of
women may live long and gladly, in all regions
where heaven gives, earth brings forth, and
the waters bear along the fruits of industry ?

PREFACE.

THE following volumes are not put forward as a substitute for
the monographs, which Egyptologists and other specialists still
hesitate to produce, because of the gaps alike in their material
and their knowledge. The object is rather to enable the economic
student to utilize the crumbs that have fallen already from the
explorers' table. If, in bringing the fragments together, any ac-
ceptable light is cast upon the bearing of original documents, it
will be a small return for great obligations.

The comparative scarcity of notes and references must be
attributed solely to considerations of space; references to a number
of conflicting authorities, without any discussion of the inferences
drawn from them, are useless or misleading ; and full discussion,
with an apparatus of pieces justificatives, has a tendency to produce
notes as long as the text, or even (as in the case of some admirable
German monographs) considerably longer. In the second volume
particularly, where it has sometimes been necessary to condense
the history of half a century into three lines, the multiplication of
references seemed as much out of place as in any equally con-
densed School History. In the later chapters, when no authority
is quoted, it is because the statements made can be verified in any
one of half a dozen accessible books of reference.

All actual citations have been acknowledged, but, as the notes
do not profess to supply a bibliography, the references given are
sometimes, out of gratitude, to the earliest, and sometimes, for con-
venience, to the most accessible, instead of always to the last or
best version of a text. Contemporaries of Dr. Erman, for instance,
hardly need to make the acquaintance of Chabas, whose name,
however, cannot be omitted from a list of those to whom the
writer's obligations are greatest. Besides the gratitude due to
every original recorder of authentic facts and to every cautious
and courageous translator of authentic texts, the writer is under
the most special and extensive obligations to the works of MM.
Brugsch, Maspero, Oppert ; of Professors Revillout, Hommel, and
Sayce ; of Baron von Richthofen and Dr. Legge ; and those of

viii PREFACE.

the late E. Biot and Sir Henry Yule ; unhappily the same epithet
must be added to the names of Professor Robertson Smith and
M. Victor Revillout The list might be lengthened by the names
of Prof. Ramsay, Dr. Glaser, Mr. Logan, Mr. Herbert Giles, M.
Eugene Simon, the Rev. C. J. Ball, Prof. Douglas, M. Terrien
de Lacouperie, Sir Charles Elton, and so many others, that
the reader would tire of the litany, though a word of special
acknowledgment may be allowed for the courteous replies to
every personal inquiry, accorded by every possessor of special
information to whom the writer has applied.

In regard to the orthography of proper names, it is perhaps
needful to explain that no system has been followed, except so far
as possible to choose the most familiar form, or, where none is
familiar, the shortest and least unpronounceable. A uniform and
scientific system of transliteration, like that in the Sacred Books of
the East, results in a number of unfamiliar forms. And, at the
same time, when the reader, who is not interested in the exact
value of Egyptian characters, is liable to meet elsewhere with forms
differing as widely as Amenophis and Amenhotep, it is convenient
to treat them as convertible. In Chinese, the names Chow and
Tcheou are equally synonymous, and in general Teh and Ou instead
of Ch or W, may be regarded as reminiscences of a French translator.
But, in the present state of Chinese knowledge, it would hardly be
useful, for instance, to refer to all the personages mentioned by De
Mailla under different names from those used by him.

On matters of more importance, where the best authorities are
disagreed, it is inevitable that the writer should sometimes have
followed the wrong one, and will sometimes be thought to have
done so, while the best lights of the moment are liable to be cor-
rected by future discoveries ; and in order not to exceed the limit
of two volumes, a certain amount of interesting and relevant ma-
terial has been omitted, of which well-informed readers may note
the absence. With regard to all these points, and to other in-
voluntary oversights and errors, it can only be hoped that they
may not be found, upon the whole, to invalidate the general results,
elicited as fresh material for economic students.

E. J. S.

CONTENTS.

I. INTRODUCTION i

II. PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS 14

BOOK I.
O WNERSHIP IN EG YPT.

I. THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS . . 37

The Prehistoric Kingdom and the Nomes .... 37

Egyptian Theory of the Ruler's Duty 43

Hereditary and Appointed Officers 48

II. THE ECONOMIC ORDER 65

Fertility and Food 65

Ancient and Modern Abuses 73

Agriculture and Cattle Farming . . . . . -77
Administration through Stewards . . .' . -83
Slavery 90

III. COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY 94

Domestic and Foreign Traffic 94

Art and Architecture 100

The Praise of Learning . . . . . . . .104

Manufacturers and Apprenticeships 106

IV. CASTE AND DESCENT 108

V. THE MILITARY CLASS 129

VI. THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD . . .144
The Worship of Animals and Natural Forces . . . 144
The Worship of Ancestors and Property in Tombs . -152
Proprietary Interests of the Priests as Undertakers . .162

Temple Property 169

VII. CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM 181

VIII. DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW 198

Domestic Relationships . ....... 198

Proprietary Partnership of Wives 204

Proprietary Rights of Children 212

BOOK II.
ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

I. SUMERIAN CIVILIZATION . .229

II. BABYLONIAN CHRONOLOGY 252

III. THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD . . 261

viii PREFACE.

the late E. Biot and Sir Henry Yule ; unhappily the same epithet
must be added to the names of Professor Robertson Smith and
M. Victor Revillout. The list might be lengthened by the names
of Prof. Ramsay, Dr. Glaser, Mr. Logan, Mr. Herbert Giles, M.
Eugene Simon, the Rev. C. J. Ball, Prof. Douglas, M. Terrien
de Lacouperie, Sir Charles Elton, and so many others, that
the reader would tire of the litany, though a word of special
acknowledgment may be allowed for the courteous replies to
every personal inquiry, accorded by every possessor of special
information to whom the writer has applied.

In regard to the orthography of proper names, it is perhaps
needful to explain that no system has been followed, except so far
as possible to choose the most familiar form, or, where none is
familiar, the shortest and least unpronounceable. A uniform and
scientific system of transliteration, like that in the Sacred Books of
the East, results in a number of unfamiliar forms. And, at the
same time, when the reader, who is not interested in the exact
value of Egyptian characters, is liable to meet elsewhere with forms
differing as widely as Amenophis and Amenhotep, it is convenient
to treat them as convertible. In Chinese, the names Chow and
Tcheou are equally synonymous, and in general Teh and On instead
of Ch or W, may be regarded as reminiscences of a French translator.
But, in the present state of Chinese knowledge, it would hardly be
useful, for instance, to refer to all the personages mentioned by De
Mailla under different names from those used by him.

E. J. S.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. INTRODUCTION i

II. PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS 14

BOOK I.
OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

I. THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS . . 37

The Prehistoric Kingdom and the Nomes .... 37

Egyptian Theory of the Ruler's Duty 43

Hereditary and Appointed Officers 48

II. THE ECONOMIC ORDER 65

Fertility and Food ........ 65

Ancient and Modern Abuses 73

Agriculture and Cattle Farming . . . . . -77

Administration through Stewards . . . . . .83

Slavery 90

III. COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY 94

Domestic and Foreign Traffic 94

Art and Architecture 100

The Praise of Learning 104

Manufacturers and Apprenticeships 106

IV. CASTE AND DESCENT 108

V. THE MILITARY CLASS 129

VI. THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD . . . 144
The Worship of Animals and Natural Forces . . . 144
The Worship of Ancestors and Property in Tombs . .152
Proprietary Interests of the Priests as Undertakers . .162

Temple Property 169

VII. CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM 181

VIII. DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW 198

Domestic Relationships 198

Proprietary Partnership of Wives 204

Proprietary Rights of Children 212

BOOK II.
ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

I. SUMERIAN CIVILIZATION ' ., . .229

II. BABYLONIAN CHRONOLOGY 252

III. THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD . . . .261

x CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

IV. BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA 282

First and Second Babylonian Dynasties .... 282

The Third (Kassite) Dynasty 285

Obscure Dynasties (Fourth to Ninth) Contemporary with

Rising Power of Assyria ....... 295

Babylonia and Assyria. From Tiglath-Pileser III. to Sargon 304

From Senacherib to the Fall of Nineveh .... 309

The New Babylonian Empire 315

V. COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS .... 320

General Features ......... 320

Babylonian Mortgages 322

Ancient Title Deeds and Contracts of the First Babylonian

Dynasty 327

Commercial Phrases in Bi-lingual Syllabaries . . . 339

Babylonian and Assyrian Deeds (Fourth to Ninth Dynasty) 342

Later Babylonian Deeds and Lawsuits ..... 348

VI. DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW 360

Akkadian Law Tablet 360

Later Marriage Contracts and other Deeds executed by

Women 372

Filiation and Adoption 377

BOOK III.
FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR 383

I. THE PHOENICIANS AND CARTHAGE 389

II. PREHISTORIC POPULATIONS OF ASIA MINOR, GREECE, AND

ITALY 412

III. THE ETRUSCANS, LYCIANS, AND RHODIANS .... 425

The Etruscans 425

Lycia 427

Rhodes 441

IV. THE LAWS OF CHARONDAS 445

V. LEGENDARY AMAZONS AND HISTORICAL IBERIANS . . . 454

VI. CRETE AND SPARTA 465

VII. A SYRIAN LAW-BOOK 487

VIII. ANCIENT ARABIA 496

The Kingdoms of Ma'in and Saba ..... 497

The Nabataeans 511

Bahrein, Sokotra, and the Sea Trade 514

Traces of Pre-Islamitic Custom and Ethics in Modern Arabia 521

IX. HAMITIC AFRICAN TRIBES 530

X. MALABAR 545

PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

INTRODUCTION.

THE history of civilization is, in great measure, the history of the
progressive appropriation by mankind of the various resources of the
natural world. To know what men do and what they have is to know
practically all that history can tell us about what they are.

Even Aristotle, in spite of his contempt for all forms of mechanical
industry, was obliged, when endeavouring to reduce the elements of the
State to their simplest form, to include the ideas of property and acquisi-
tion. He defines a possession as an instrument for maintaining life ; and
the history of ownership is, in fact, a history of the way in which people
live, or of the things wherewithal they sustain their lives. What a man
takes, what he enjoys, what he uses; what he appropriates or identifies
with himself by custom, thought, and affection,— this more than anything
else goes to build up the fabric of his everyday existence. But, as the
objects which come to be regarded as property increase in number, the
social and political significance of their possession increases also ; and
we have to learn, not only what commodities are regarded as wealth in
each community, but also how they are obtained or produced, under what
conditions and for what considerations they circulate or change hands,
and what conditions law and custom impose on their final possession,
enjoyment, or use.

A complete history of ownership would thus furnish a complete history
of civilization, or of the human race ; for the character of religious beliefs,
the state of art and science, and the course of political and social develop-
ment are all reflected in proprietary institutions. Clearly, then, it is as
impossible to write a universal history of ownership as a universal history
of man. All that is possible, and all that it can be even useful to attempt,
is to describe some prominent and representative types of law and custom,
giving precedence, naturally, to those which have obtained over the widest
space, or for the longest time, and have therefore left the least meagre
records of their character. The eccentricities of savage tribes or civilized
nations are of less importance than those enduring or recurring usages,
which experience has shown to meet some permanent want, or express

P.C. B

2 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

some deep-rooted tendency, of human kind. It is true that the most
widespread and enduring usages are not so uniformly beneficial as to serve
always the purpose of an example for imitation, but they have at least one
advantage over purely visionary schemes of social organization, which have
never been realized in fact. They are certainly possible. And we may
learn from States which have lasted for thousands of years, in spite of their
defects, how we, whose failings lie in other directions, might give stability
to the foundations of the social fabric, without cramping its plan or stereo-
typing its details.

The use of history is not to sum up the varied experience of the past
in a compact formula, but to enlarge our vision of the present by a
reflection of past and future possibilities. What lies behind us is neither
a direct advance along a single line of progress, nor yet a cycle of eternal
self-repetition ; and it is certainly within the power of historic science to
discourage the repetition of the least successful social experiments of former
times by tracing the causes and extent of their failure.

From some points of view it may seem as if the logical way to begin
any sketch of the history of ownership would be to examine the
psychological foundations of the human habit of acquisitiveness, as
exemplified first among the lower animals and young children, and then
among men at the lowest stage of civilization. Such a course has every-
thing in its favour, except that it is not historical. Whatever we may know
about modern Australians or Andamanese, whatever we may guess about our
own flint-chipping progenitors, their experience does not belong chrono-
logically to the first chapter of written history. Long before our ancestors
had emerged from the savage state, into which we can only follow them
with guesses, other races had reached their political prime, and secured
for their proprietary institutions something of the fixity which we vainly
covet for our own.

The earliest times of which we have any circumstantial knowledge are
those in which we find States and nations having already reached the
degree of civilization implied in the existence of written records. The
primitive savages of antiquity have passed away, leaving no trace of their
life beyond a few bones and such rude tools as have defied the force of
time and weather. Our knowledge begins with the primitive civilizations
of antiquity, with races already numerous and possessed of political,
religious, and social ideas which are to a certain extent ascertainable.

Within historic times civilized nations have arisen, and the process of
their development out of barbarism has gone on, as it were, in our sight.
It is therefore natural to assume that ancient civilizations arose in the
same way, out of the same elements ; and, if this were so, we might begin
the history of ownership by reconstructing, in imagination, the life and
customs of the barbarians, who stood to the historical kingdoms of the
ancient East in the same relation as Franks and Teutons to the kingdoms
of the West.

But natural, and seemingly justifiable, as such an assumption would

INTRODUCTION. 3

be, it is, after all, an assumption only ; nay, it is an assumption which
carries with it a warning against any such imaginative reconstruction.
There are fundamental differences between archaic and modern civilization,
and we have no means of guessing what differences they point to in
the antecedent state of society. If modern civilization is more complex
than any archaic civilization, the records of which have reached us, it
should follow that archaic savagery must have possessed a simplicity of
which we can scarcely form a conception a priori^ especially as it must be
a simplicity not excluding the capacity for appropriate progress and
development.

Modern progressive barbarians have been offshoots from a stock that
has, somehow or other, come in fertilising collision with the products of an
older civilization ; and in their after career they have had either to conquer
or submit to other races of varying degrees of cultivation. Hence the
element of complexity, which we recognise to a certain extent in the
civilization of Greece and Rome, and still more unquestionably in the
history of modern nations. We are familiar with the manners and customs
of non-progressive, barbarous populations, whose lives are simple enough;
but we cannot recognise in them the representatives of the simple
barbarians whose descendants founded the monarchies of Egypt and
China. There must have been some undiscovered difference in the
antecedents corresponding to the recorded difference in the results ;
and, as we do not know what this difference was, rather than supply the
blank with guessing, this history will follow our sources in tracing first,
the rights and usages of ownership recognised in the most ancient
civilized States of the Eastern world, leaving the authentic records of
barbaric life to furnish the first chapters of the second part of the
narrative.

Egypt, Babylonia, and China are the three great seats of archaic
civilization, and the ancient history of each is absolutely free from
European influence. Two of them are remarkable for the permanence, as
well as the antiquity of their national greatness ; and all have left authentic
records, from which we are able to reconstruct, to some extent at least, the
outline of their social and industrial life, and to understand upon what
principles they regulated that portion of it which had to do with possessions,
or the instruments by which life is maintained. We do not attempt to guess
what went before the birth of these nations. Their existence is matter
of history, and, widely as their civilization differs from that of modern
Europe, it differs not less widely from that of all the semi-civilized or semi-
barbarous peoples with which European nations have come in contact in
historic times. The points in which they resemble each other and differ
from the rest of the world are mainly two ; and these together are enough
to explain why such nations arose, as and where they did, and also why the
same phenomenon has not been more frequently reproduced in later times
and other places.

That all life, growth, and beauty upon earth are born of the sun's light

4 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

and heat is a familiar fact ; but it is not so generally understood that the
life of the human mind, too, first started into splendid growth under the
inspiration of the uninterrupted radiance of the same great power. A
glance at a shaded map, showing the proportionate rainfall in all parts of the
world, is in itself an historical revelation. Such a map, where the darkest
shadows indicate continuous rain, will show also four white patches, repre-
senting the lands of cloudless sun. In the New World there are. two such
patches, a narrow strip along the coast of Peru, and a broader area in
Mexico, — the two seats of advanced civilization in the whole double
continent. In the Old World, as we know, Egypt is included in such
a region, which reaches its greatest breadth in the Sahara, but sends out
a loop eastward embracing most of Arabia and Persia up to the mountains
of Kabul. The fourth and last of these remarkable districts extends
practically over Central Asia, from Kashgar on the west to the eastern
mountains of Mongolia, and from the highlands of Tibet to the northern
shores of what was once the Mediterranean Sea of Asia ; it includes cities
and oases of ancient fame and culture, such as Yarkand and Khotan, and
others long since buried in the desert sands, as well as the whole route to
be traversed by any stream of migration, that turned its face eastward from
the Bolor Mountains, in a quest that could find no settled goal short of
the fertile valley of the Wei, in China.

In three continents such a coincidence of climate and history does not
befall by chance, and a sound instinct led the first civilized dwellers in these
fervent lands to deify the heavenly presence in which they saw, and saw
truly, the father of their own greatness. But this same map shows us also
rainless deserts that have given birth to no great nations, and are barren
of all other life. The Sahara and the desert of Gobi have one condition
of fruitfulness in ceaseless sun ; but great kingdoms, it seems, only grow up
where the land of ceaseless sun is watered by great streams fed from far-away
regions of almost ceaseless rain or snow ; or, in other words, in fertile
alluvial plains, traversed by great water highways. Such a position implies
the possession by the earliest settlers of rich pastures and fertile arable
land ; domesticated animals and cultivated grains ; abundant materials,
both animal and vegetable, for clothing as well as food, and in all proba-
bility, some knowledge of metals brought from the highlands, whence races,
like rivers, are wont to spring. Very few of the most advanced barbarous
races possess all'these advantages at once; and, as a crowning distinction,
in the rainless lands, not too far removed from the Equator, the sun-god
himself plays the drawing master through the cloudless days, teaching his
apt and favoured worshippers how to perpetuate and dignify their history
with a written record.

It may be a mere fancy that, where writing masters now trace their cha-
racters on the sand, the first framers of those characters traced in the same
way the outlines of the shadows made by real objects ; but it is a fact that
hieroglyphic writing originated in lands with short clear shadows, and
that the first delineation of natural figures would be rendered easier, if not

INTR OD UCTION. 5

first suggested, by the shadow pictures thrown by the sun on every rock
and wall, and needing only, as it were, to be traced, not copied. Such of
the Egyptian hieroglyphs as are not conventionalized show just such a
profile outline — of a bird, a tool, a human figure — as a system of silhouettes
would furnish ; and the art of Egypt, Babylonia, and Mexico all possess
characteristics which would be by themselves suggestive of such an origin.
Whether hieroglyphic writing originated in this way or not, writing of a
more or less remotely hieroglyphic character is associated with all the
primitive civilizations we have named, and the possession of such writing,
together with the nature and resources of the country occupied, are the two
chief, common determining elements in their after career.

The use of writing, even in its most cumbrous form, is at once a sign of
intellectual superiority and the cause of further progress. It is easy enough
to indicate a few simple facts or events by signs or pictures answering to
the imitative gestures or sign language of the deaf and dumb. The North
American Indians and some other uncivilized nations have got as far as
this. But to make a written language as copious as speech and as flexible
as thought is a very different achievement, and we can hardly exaggerate
the importance of the first step towards it. If the air was full of ghosts,
when living men told well-remembered tales of their grandfathers, what
must have been the effect produced when dead men could leave words
written on the living rock behind them, substituting a real posthumous in-
fluence for the incalculable intervention attributed to them at the whim
of imaginative superstition ? In more ways than one the historic period
begins then. Men think of their own and other lives, before and after, as
forming part of the same story ; the race puts on a kind of immortality, and
its leading minds begin to crave after theories and principles of corre-
spondingly wide and lasting application.

It is true that there have been unlettered races since, with a rich oral
literature, and the possession of an alphabet does not necessarily lead to the
development of a philosophic polity, but it is at least reasonable to suppose
that the archaic philosophy and the archaic character, which we find
existing together, owed their existence to substantially the same outburst
of intellectual vigour. The great pre-alphabetic civilizations did, as a fact,
develop, together with their system of picture writing, a full system of
social and political ethics ; a theory of human life and duty, which has a
claim on our attention, not merely because we find in it the earliest com-
mentary of human reason on human conduct, but also because the theory
thus presented was accepted, more simply and completely than perhaps
has ever been the case since, by the whole community, as the base and
groundwork of every-day custom, and the common standard by which. the
conduct of all classes in their relations to each other should be tried. The
primitive generalizations as to the duty of men and rulers, which meet us in
ancient Chinese and Egyptian texts, may not have been formulated before
the art of writing was invented, and they certainly were formulated when
the art was still comparatively young. In any case their potency when

6 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

written as well as formulated was increased, at least as much as that
of the king whose conquests for the first time obtained a monumental
record.

Up to a certain point, the invention of picture writing would give a fresh
stimulus to thought. But while the thought of each generation is controlled
by its language, the development of a written language is controlled by its
character. Pure hieroglyphs can express direct narrative or precept, and
are admirably adapted for the composition of magic texts in which mys-
terious images are to be suggested, the significance of which it is left to the
imagination of dupes or adepts to fill in as they please. But such a charac-
ter is less able than a spoken language to lend itself to the needs of ab-
stract thought or reasoning. A system of debased hieroglyphs must either
develop into an unwieldy alphabet or syllabary, or it must confine the
thoughts of those who use it within the round of familiar, more or less
visualized notions ; or else, as in China and Egypt, it must end by accepting
in a measure both drawbacks. It is not by a chance coincidence that all
pre-alphabetic civilization is conservative in tendency ; the remarkable
thing is that the world's first attempts at civilization should have been so
temperately and judiciously conceived as to admit of the permanence,
which the genius of their founders and their literature tended to de-
mand.

If we would know what a primitive people, with sun, water, and the
art of writing to help them, would make of their life, in a fertile land, we
must confine our attention mainly to China and Egypt, for in those two
countries the problems of civilized life were worked out continuously and
consistently, with the least possible disturbance or interruption from with-
out. In Mesopotamia, on the other hand, where an empire of kindred
origin and character flourished at an equally early date, instead of such
isolation as Plato coveted and Egypt and China long enjoyed, the primi-
tive state found itself planted in the very centre and focus of international
and interracial communication.

Primitive States are always of modest dimensions ; and Sumer and
Akkad had no natural frontiers on a scale corresponding to the national
development. Vigorous nationalities were rising up all round, and
whether they came in war or peace, for conquest or for commerce, it was
impossible to bar the way against invaders. So it comes to pass that the in-
dustrial history of the valley of the Euphrates, if not less instructive than that
of the Nile or the Yellow River, is very different and in a way transitional.
The Egyptians were cultivators and artists ; the Chinese are cultivators
and artisans. The Babylonian excelled alike in science, art, industry, and
agriculture, and was moreover a trader and a merchant, the forerunner of
the ancient Phoenician and the modern Jew ; only at the very bottom of
his heaps of ruins, below the traces left successively by Roman, Persian, and
Semitic conquerors, we find traces of the primitive economy, which, left
to itself, possessed so many elements of stability, and in any case exercised
an influence, of which we can scarcely exaggerate the importance, upon

INTRODUCTION. 7

the thought and culture of the adjoining or superincumbent populations.
In ancient Egypt we find the best stationary state at which the primitive
civilizations of the Old World could arrive. China still survives, happily
spared by the deluges of history, to show what the life of past geologic
ages was really like.

To ancient Babylon, on the other hand, we owe the suggestions and
some of the first motives by which men and nations are still unceasingly
embroiled, with only the hope to comfort them that they may emerge out
of the turmoil a trifle richer or stronger than before. Not that the primi-
tive Akkadians invented or discovered our modern gospel of progress by
catastrophe : it only happened to be their fate to dwell first in the land
destined to serve as a battle ground for the ruling races of the world. Egypt
and China led their own life, uncontrolled if not unmolested; the successive
and rival empires of Mesopotomia had individually a briefer and less pros-
perous career, but they exercised a wider influence over the lives of other
nations. Moreover, though power and prosperity were always changing
hands, with almost modern frequency, in this central State, peace and
prosperity were almost always to be found there ; so that it seems as if the
geographical position, which was fatal to political stability, was not equally
injurious to those conditions of economic stability, originally perhaps
shared by the Akkadians with their more secluded kinsmen and coevals.

Recent discoveries allow us to entertain as an hypothesis, though hardly
yet to assert as a fact, that the nations thus superficially alike in circum-
stances, history, and temperament may have been also ethnologically allied.
A possible community of origin, a real similarity in circumstances and
temperament, resulting in a more or less complete similarity of institutions,
are sufficient reasons for including the economic history of these three
nations in the section to which they all belong chronologically, that is to
say, in the first chapter of a history of ownership.

When the Old World was new and scantily peopled, the strongest off-
shoots of its ablest race gravitated towards the richest lands; but the usages
which they share with feebler and less fortunate kindred must have existed
in the germ before the separation, and have therefore been originally inde-
pendent of the material abundance which founded the prosperity of the
first great nations. We cannot attribute Egyptian greatness wholly to the
spirit of the national customs and temperament, for the customs and temper
have been shared by unhistoric peoples ; we only know that they are,
under certain conditions, evidently compatible with a fine development of
national power and prosperity ; and they have stood alone hitherto in their
capacity for preserving such power and prosperity, when attained, for
periods which the restless ambition of the West finds hardly credible.

The nations belonging to the group of which Egypt and China are repre-
sentative are for the most part easy-going, pleasure-loving, and pacific,
somewhat anarchic, in the strict sense of the word ; that is to say, private
life in them is little controlled by government or legislation ; they are
liberal, in the sense that public opinion always praised giving more than

8 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

getting, and required a free distribution of family property amongst the
members of the household, and of State property among such members of
the State as were in need ; and they are also very strongly conservative, since
all classes valued their life just as it was, feeling and believing that any
change at any point must be a change for the worse. If we have to find
a single word to describe the points in which these States resemble each
other and differ from the modern world, which traces its intellectual
parentage to Greece and Rome, it may be said that the civilization of the
great civilized States of antiquity was domestic, and the civilization of
European States political ; that is to say, in ancient Egypt and Babylonia,
and with some qualifications in China, the relations of family life and the
details of domestic administration were entirely civilized and humane.
As fighting States they were nearly as barbaric as their neighbours ; foreign
and domestic politics, in the modern sense, were equally non-existent,
and there was virtually no political organization within the State; which is
no doubt one reason why the otherwise stable fabric was so easily over-
turned or revolutionized by the introduction of foreign elements. But
the customs of family life, agricultural and commercial usage, and the
respect for history, philosophy, and art were, in many cases, actually in
advance of those reached much later in States with a political civiliza-
tion.

Politics, in the modern sense, the thing as well as the word, is no older
than the cities of Greece and Rome ; the political, as contrasted with the
domestic civilizations are those in which the organization of public life and
government is considered of the first importance, and in which the public
administration occupies itself mainly in regard to foreign affairs, wars and
treaties, and the interests of the Government as such. The moral and
intellectual qualities of political races cause their private life also to emerge
from barbarism, but in this case the private relations rather lag behind the
public ones in urbanity and refinement. In the domestic States the un-
selfish kindness shown by the normal father and mother to their children
furnishes the model which the Government, in the comparatively narrow
sphere assigned to it, is expected to imitate and reproduce. In political
States, on the other hand, the natural relations of parents and children,
husbands and wives, masters and servants are apt to be obscured or
perverted by the intrusion of analogies of political authority and subor-
dination.

The economy of Egypt, China, and Babylonia differ in a thousand details,
and the usages or institutions which were common to them did not, of
course, receive equal development in all or perfect development in either.
It would therefore be unhistorical to substitute the logical ideal which we
can construct after the event for a record of the real, more or less tenta-
tive experiments made independently, though on parallel lines. The
surviving records, which reflect their ancient life, tell us most concerning
family relationships in Egypt, concerning commercial relationships in
Babylonia, and in China most respecting the relations between the ruler

INTR OD UCTION. 9

and the common people. In each case, of course, the comparative abun-
dance of materials bearing on one or other subject is itself a sign of the
relative prominence of that element in the national life. But the Egyptian
mother or daughter, the Akkadian banker or commercial partner, the
Chinese emperor or prime minister, are all figures that must have flourished
in societies of identical type, with similar organization and ideals.

The term gynaecocratic has been applied to some of these communities,
on the ground of their sharing the widespread archaic conception of
family relationships, in which the mother is regarded as the natural head
and namesake of the household; but it is scarcely appropriate, since the
higher status and greater social influence enjoyed by women in these
States did not result in their taking any greater share in the actual govern-
ment, though it may have tended to minimise the action of the State in
matters relating to the family. Primitive Babylonia alone shows signs of
an actual precedence having been accorded at one time to women. In
Akkadian texts we read of " women and men," " goddesses and gods,"
and there are other traces of the archaic principle of "Mutter-recht," which
suggest the conjecture that the domestic civilizations may have started
from this principle, as Roman custom and the laws and usages based upon
it start from the theory of ' patria potestas.

Communities in which this " mother-law " prevails are supposed to be
those in which the organization of family life has been so recently effected,
that manners and customs still survive which presuppose its non-existence ;
and children are called after their mothers because their fathers are un-
known. We propose to discuss savage and barbarous customs in con-
nection with the tribes and peoples actually known to us during their
savage and barbarous condition, rather than in connection with hypotheti-
cal pictures of the pre-historic state of historic nations. It would there-
fore be premature to investigate, a propos of Egyptian civilization, those
cruder forms of family relationship which have been copiously discussed
by Bachofen, Morgan, McLennan, and their critics and commentators.
We can no more say why the Egyptian wife and mother enjoyed rights
and privileges unknown elsewhere, than we can explain why Roman
fathers took an equally exceptional view of their own prerogatives ; but
the singularities of Egyptian usage may be rendered somewhat more in-
telligible by comparison with the detached usages having the same genea-
logy which happen to have survived elsewhere.

There is no one of the leading traits of modern family life which can
be put forward as so pre-eminently and absolutely natural as to be univer-
sal. Polygamy flourishes along with rarer experiments in monogamy,
and has been practised by women as well as men. Children are some-
times reared and sometimes abandoned or put to death by their parents.
Marriage is sometimes a light relation during pleasure on both sides,
sometimes an indestructible bond, trebly woven of duty, inclination, and
convenience, and sometimes it rests on a one-sided utility, involving the
virtual slavery of wives ; sometimes the authority of the father, sometimes

io PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

that of the moiher, and sometimes that of both parents over their children
is unrecognised, while elsewhere the authority of one — or it may be of
both— is carried to the point of almost fantastical absoluteness. Our
notion of what is natural in family relationships is compounded of all those
features of family life which, upon a calm retrospect, appear to our present
taste as useful and agreeable, wholesome and pleasant in their average
mediocrity, and altogether beautiful and good in their perfection. The
ideal of the present day has never been exactly realized in the past,
but it may safely be said that no nation has attained to a civilization of
any solidity and grace without organizing the domestic relations in a way
that includes, at least, some ideal elements ; and in what we have called
the domestic civilizations, the organization of the family was complete at
the earliest date to which our authorities extend.

Materials for the social and economic history of the ancient States, with
a civilization of the domestic type, are only now beginning to be accessible,
and, like the first missionaries in China, the pioneers of these studies
startle us with their reports of an historic golden age in quarters yet un-
dreamt of. It is argued, and with great plausibility, that the so-called jus
gentium, the law of nations, to which the lawyers of later Rome resorted
when desirous of correcting the narrow formalism of their own strict code,
was not a mere metaphysical invention or imagination of their own, but
that, in fact, this law represented the actual usage — or as much as Romans
could understand of the usage — prevailing among the civilized nations
which drew their inspiration, first or last, from Egypt and Chaldaea.

Without going so far as to advocate a return to the economy of China
and Egypt, it must be admitted that, in the most literal sense, that order
is nearer to the "state of nature" than our own; and therefore, whatever
elements of good we can see in it to covet, cannot be ridiculed as out of
reach, because it is against nature that they should be enjoyed. Still less
need we hesitate to borrow directly any hints of wisdom that may be
attainable now, from a source to which we are apparently already so much
in debt. The correction of Roman law by the equity of the jus gentium
bears a close resemblance to the correction of the English common law
by the equity of the canon law, derived from the humanized ecclesiastical
reading of Roman legislation, after the intervention of the jus gentium • and
the seventeenth century writers on the law of nature and of nations added
little of their own, while borrowing freely from the same sources. Thus
twice already the aberrations of law from justice, in political nations,
have been corrected or restrained by a reference to the usages which the
Romans only half understood, and which are now more than half forgotten.
And if, as will be seen, we have materials for judging afresh what the law
of nations in pre-Roman times really was, we may claim to be better able
than they to judge how much of it modern law and custom may profitably
copy or adopt.

It cannot be said, to refer to a famous distinction, that status ruled in
these earlier societies, and contract in those which have succeeded them ;

INTRODUCTION. n

for we meet with contracts of the most varied forms, touching the most
vital relationships, at a very early date ; but the contracts habitually
entered into, in the States which resist progress and change together,
were contracts in effect and intention conservative of Ihe existing status^
and that equally in the case of both parties to any normal and legitimate
agreement. The stability attained was thus the result of free and deliberate,
more or less conscious choice, not of blind habit or instinct. And it may
be observed that no progressive society, resting upon freedom of contract,
can attain security for the goods, which are the mark and guerdon of its
progress, unless the free-will of the whole community is pledged, as in
these ancient States, to exercise itself conservatively — a result which, of
course, is out of sight, so long as large masses of the community are dis-
satisfied, either with the social order in which they find themselves, or
with their own status therein.

The condition of the conservatism of ancient States was the content of
all, and especially of the most numerous class, with their social status and
the degree of material well-being habitual in it. The condition of this
content, as we shall see, lay in the abundance of the food supply, and
its distribution so as to meet the wants of all, and especially of the largest,
labouring class. The experience of these communities is interesting and
instructive, as showing the earliest and simplest solution of the problem
how a nation can live in millions and have enough to eat. Man does not
live by bread alone, and the Hellas of Homer, Phidias and Plato is known
in the world's record office for quite different achievements. Yet the
problem how to keep the people alive was not less real in those tiny States
which failed to solve it adequately than in the great plain of China.
Rome, again, lives by the memory of her great generals, statesmen, and
the lawyers, whose originality is now impugned ; not because, when her
Scipios had degenerated into Caesars, corn ships from every quarter of the
known world bore food to Italy. While working out some other problems
of statecraft, Rome has no economic lessons to teach, except in the way
of warning ; and between the Roman empire and ourselves we find
nothing but beginnings, experiments, catastrophes, and a new beginning,
which, it seems, nothing short of a miracle of good-will and intelligence
can save from ending in a fresh catastrophe.

Out of the various experiments of the past, so much political and
mechanical skill has been bequeathed to us, that plague, famine, and the
ravages of war no longer stand between us and the problem how to feed
the millions : we call it failure now to acquiesce in a stationary state in
which they should be only fed, — kept alive on condition of claiming no
share in the intellectual and political life which every aristocracy in-
stinctively claims for itself. Yet even this failure we know it is beyond
our power to achieve. On the one hand, if things go on at their present
pace, we shall have to confront millions who are not fed ; and, on the other,
there are already millions who demand, not merely food, but a share in the
amenities of civilized life.

12 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

It would be absurd to maintain that the democracy of Europe sees its
own way clearly to the solution of political and economical problems which
have never yet been solved conjointly. But destruction is an easier task
than creation, and unless the force of democratic feeling is enlisted in sup-
port of the present social order, it may be trusted sooner or later to shift
the incidence of its burdens by a revolutionary upheaval, leaving the world,
it may be, in the long run little the better, but giving a momentary satisfac-
tion to those whose present condition is such that no change in it can be
for the worse. Conservatism is impossible in a State where this class is
large.

To combine progress and stability, it is necessary, not to prevent all
change of status on the part of individuals, but to establish laws and cus-
toms which shall make it impossible for large classes to contract themselves
into an intolerably painful or injurious status ; or for individuals to enter
into contracts, however personally advantageous, which will in effect tend
to produce such a result for the other parties concerned. Stability alone,
without progress, cannot be achieved except upon these terms,. and progress
without stability means a succession of losses, compensated by gains which
have no guarantee of permanence. But human nature differs little and
changes slowly, so that all human experience is available for the guidance
of the latest generations. And, in an age which has accomplished such
marvels in the way of self-adjusting machinery and compensating balances
as the present, it should not be impossible to assign the limits within which
individual liberty of action must be confined in order to secure to the
individual himself the supreme good of dwelling in a community without
victims.

The first civilized race invented letters and the family ; the second intro-
duced the world to the conceptions of theology and theocracy ; the third
invented the State, and modes of administration which give some colour to
the illusion that men may be governed by laws expressing the will of " a
political superior." But men of all countries and colours are so much alike
that differences of race, language, creed or custom can only be perpetuated
by isolation, which grows day by day more impossible and incomplete.
Every idea and observance to be met with now is the product of compound
influences, and, saving such races as may be already in course of extinction,
there is no portion of the human race naturally incapable of assimilating
any sound doctrine or useful custom preached or practised by yellow, red,
or white philosophers since wheat first grew in Mesopotamia.

We still look, as yet in vain, for a final synthetic inspiration, which shall
enable the civilized world to combine and reconcile the detached ideals of
the past ; but we see more and more clearly that no good thing is naturally
incompatible with another good ; and that, when any valued edifice of the
past is threatened with collapse, it is only for want of a firm foundation
having been laid for it in some other corner-stone of social wisdom. And
therefore we do not doubt the power of posterity to combine the realization
of family affection and social well-being, as shadowed forth in the earliest

INTRODUCTION. 13

civilized States, with the possession of political freedom and activity as
demanded by the heirs of Grseco-Roman thought ; while we believe the
lasting character of both gains can be best assured, if accompanied by a
clear vision of spiritual realities, such as was sought and sighed for by
Semitic seers.

PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS.

THE general resemblances between China, Egypt, and the kingdoms of
Mesopotamia have been noticed by many writers, who regard them as
accidental, or at least as the result of similar, not identical antecedents.
The interest of their history does not depend on the community of their
origin ; but, as the study of their social and economic systems certainly
tends to accentuate the resemblances, it is reasonable also to enumerate
the considerations which favour the hypothesis of such an origin. The
history of prehistoric times is blocked out, after a fashion, when every
hypothesis is excluded which runs counter to sound linguistic, ethnological,
or geographical data. And a certain presumption remains in favour of
any theory which is not proved to be inconsistent with any of these three
sets of conditions.

There is documentary proof that the art and the ethnological features of
the earliest inhabitants of Egypt and Babylonia resembled each other, to
an extent which can most easily be explained on the supposition of a near
relationship between the two peoples. Such a relationship would be
readily accepted, notwithstanding their geographical separation, were it not
for the fact that they belong linguistically to two distinct families. But
this objection itself loses its force, as the linguistic affinities of the
Egyptians are any way with the tongues of Asia, not those of Africa ; and
on that ground alone the balance of opinion among scholars is in favour of
their having migrated from the earliest settled parts of the former conti-
nent.

On the other hand, there is no ethnological difficulty in the way of a
connection between the prehistoric Babylonians and the Chinese, and the
linguistic difficulty is lessened by the fact that the languages of both belong
to primary types, illustrating the earliest phase of grammatical divergence.
It is therefore possible, without paradox or heresy, to imagine the ances-
tors of the Egyptians in contact with the primitive inhabitants of Baby-
lonia, and there are only geographical obstacles in the way of similar
contact between the latter and the ancestors of the Chinese.

To take the geographical problem first : In the mountainous district
which connects the Hindu Koosh with the Tien Shan range, four great
streams of ancient fame have their sources. The Oxus or Amu Daria
flows thence westward and the Yarkand River eastward, joined by the
streams of Khotan and Kashgar ; the sources of the Sir Daria or Jaxartes

PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS. 15

are but a little further to the north, while some of the minor streams which
feed the Upper Indus flow southward from the same heights. There must
have been a time when the second of these streams was but a mountain
torrent flowing into a Mediterranean Sea, and when the great river of
Turkestan watered narrower fertile territories bordering lakes far larger than
those of the present day. Fertile mountain valleys still run down from the
Hindu Koosh to the Oxus, and the Bolor Mountains with their easy passes
enclose the steppes of Pamir, whence the Khirghiz still drive their flocks
down the gradual slope to Khotan.

The valleys of Persia and Bokhara are dominated on the east by the
Bolor Mountains and the Hindu Koosh, just as the plains of Mesopotamia
are by the heights of Elam and Susiana. Six thousand years ago it is
probable that the more easterly of these regions was far more continuously
habitable and productive than now ; any race, therefore, surging westward
from the heights of Pamir would make its way easily as far as Elam, and in
fact the after history of the Medes and Persians proves the existence of a
large Turanian population remaining in this district at a comparatively recent
date. A priori no one would have dreamt of accounting for the birth of
letters and the common features of the distant monarchies of Egypt and
China by imagining Turanians in Babylonia. But it is now among the un-
questioned facts of history that the earliest monuments and inscriptions of
Mesopotamia are the work of men whose language was of this type. It
may be that the continued expansion of this stock towards the west was
arrested when it came in contact with another race, destined to invent in-
flections— among other works of art, — and that the check in this quarter
caused the tide of migration to set towards the east.

The ancient city of Khotan, characterized by Ritter as the most
remarkable spot in Central Asia, the meeting-place of India, China, and
Tibet, lies in a rich oasis near the eastern base of the hills on the west of
the central desert sea. It is here that Baron von Richthofen, considering
the subject as a geographer, in connection with the history of China alone,
supposes the original seat of the Chinese to have been, and the view is
confirmed by the exceptional way in which early Chinese authorities speak
of the good manners of the inhabitants and their physical resemblance to
the Chinese.1 The extent of the oasis five thousand years ago must have
been far greater than at present, when the place is filled with rumours of
cities buried beneath the sands. In the early days of Buddhism the city
was one of the most prosperous in Central Asia, and even in modern times
the State has flourished on a scale that would pass for respectable in
ancient Greece. Khotan might thus be accepted as an early settlement
of the race, even supposing its real origin to be sought further west still, in
the highlands on either side of the great water parting already alluded to.

There is, then, no insuperable difficulty in the way of the hypothesis of
a common nursery for the ancestors of primitive civilization, lying some-
where between Khotan on the east and the sources of the Karun on the
1 A. Remusat, Histoire de la Ville de Khotan, pp. 30-32.

1 6 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

west. Turkestan and Northern Persia five or six thousand years ago were
more fertile, and, except for their unchanged mountain ranges, more easily
traversed than now, when all the aggravated natural difficulties are multi-
plied and complicated by the hostility of a jealous population. The dis-
tances to be covered by migration from the valleys of Badakshan to the
highlands of Susiana are no greater, the obstacles to be overcome no more
formidable, than those which separated the Aryas of Iran from those of
the Punjaub. Even as recently as in Marco Polo's time, the whole coun-
try between the Indus and the Oxus was both more fertile and more
populous than now. Where the Venetian traveller rode through pleasant
woods, his successor finds only deserts ; and if we go back to the distant
days when the kingdoms of Egypt and China were unfounded, the process
of deterioration may hardly have begun, and almost the whole district
have been fertile and habitable. The vale of Kashmir is still fruitful ; the
mountains of Badakshan are still furrowed by fertile valleys and set with
high plains, with air still as pure and bracing as when Messer Marco lost
his fever there, and described the fame of the district as a sanatorium.
The Oxus itself flows from a lake on the high Pamir plateau, more than
15,000 feet above the sea level, and the pastures of this "roof of the
world," as it is called,1 are said to be so nourishing and rich that sick
beasts revive at once upon it, but those left too long there die of over-
feeding. Barley was formerly grown high up the pass, and Wood thought
a crop might still be snatched during the summer heats. The wide steppe
beyond the lake, with its countless wild fowl, is now barren, but not im-
passable even in winter, though at times the caravan loads may have to be
shifted from mules or camels to the hardier yak, much as, before the
Alpine passes are open, travellers may have had to change from diligence
to sledge to cross the reach of snow at the head of the St. Gothard or the
Simplon. Finally, it must not be forgotten that the few travellers who
have reached this inaccessible region are struck by the European type of
feature and the intelligence of the scanty and depressed Kafir population,
who of all the surrounding stocks perhaps have changed least from the
original type ; which shows that the district is physically adapted for the
development of a fine type of humanity, though geographical circum-
stances have not enabled its inhabitants to secure for themselves the poli-
tical independence of Switzerland or Afghanistan.

It is but an hypothesis that would place in these highlands about the
source of the Oxus the cradle of the great primitive civilizations of Asia and
Africa ; but let the connection between the Akkadians and the Chinese be
once established, and so far as they are concerned the hypothesis becomes
a practical certainty. Nations are not born in the plain. The tide of
population streams like a torrent from the bracing highlands, and the
mountain range which acts as a water parting also marks in most cases the
boundary between different branches of a race of men. If we are to

1 The importance of this district in modern politics is not unlike that which it must
have possessed originally for the rudimentary nations around it.

PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS. 17

imagine a common ancestry for Menes, Yao, and Gudea, this undivided
race of great progenitors may have scattered its settlements from Khotan
and Kashgar to Balkh and Herat, or even further west. From the table-
land of the Pamirs the ground sinks in every direction, except to the
south-east, where similar plateaux extend north of the Himalayas to Tibet,
and in every direction but this, the mountaineers would find an easy de-
scent to rich lands from which it would seem easier to advance than to go
back. The first substantial offshoot from the western extremity we sup-
pose to have reached Egypt after slow drifting through or round Arabia.
Later, yet perhaps not much later, an equally vigorous branch turned its
face eastward " from the ancestral home, and after setting its mark on
Khotan, spread from oasis to oasis and from steppe to steppe, further and
further east, as the sand encroached upon each over populated and over
cultivated resting place.

The course of the Tarim River may have determined the direction of
Chinese immigration as far as Lob-nor, or more than half-way across the
central desert, after which the emigrants would be led by
another water-course towards the Yulduz Valley, and then lured CMna
eastward by an improving climate to Khami, which is within a
few days' march from the entrance to China at Suchow. At the present
day, notwithstanding the strange severity of the winter frosts, the produce
of the Tarim Valley is said to include most of the grains and fruits found
in Southern Europe. The soil is only barren from drought.

The movement may have gathered impetus from the gradual change of
climate, combining with the effects of cultivation, in narrowing the area of
fruitfulness. The gathering sand behind would, as it were, obliterate the
traces of those who had passed by ; and as the vanguard exhausted the
resources of the soil, the rear would have to quicken its advance, till the
future nation could gather itself together, and pass in a body through the
"Jade Gate" of the future kingdom of Cathay. Ages afterwards, when
commercial and political intercourse between Khotan and China made a
highway through the desert, the resting places on the road were at oases,
marked by ruined cities ; and at the time of the first migration, such habit-
able spots must have been frequent enough to do away with the marvel
that attaches to the idea of an agricultural people moving, of their own
accord, across 2,000 miles of desert.

The outline of the present provinces of China proper tells unequivocally
by what route the black-haired people entered. The importance of the
Yellow River and the frequent mention of its inundations, in the most
ancient records of Chinese literature, have led many writers to assume that
the Chinese entered their future home by following the southward course
of that river, on the eastern side of the great horseshoe bend, which it
takes between the present Lan-chow and the junction of the Wei. These
writers have not observed that the Great Wall of China, which skirts, with
singular precision, the natural outline of the agricultural land, itself cuts off
the northern half of the horseshoe, the inside of which, from time imme-
p.c. c

i8 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

morial, has been the haunt of nomad tribes, no more civilized than the
Ordos who occupy it now. The modern province of Kansu 1 has a narrow
tongue stretching some 300 miles north-westward from the western bend
of the Hoangho, as far as Suchow, the western limit of the Great Wall ;
and its counterpart, the ancient Yung, seems to have included streams and
settlements, since surrendered to nomads or the desert, yet another 300
miles to the westward. China, like Egypt, is a land of difficult access, and
the road by which the Chinese had entered was the one by which they
were most liable to be invaded, the one which it was important to them to
guard and fortify against enemies, while at the same time they kept it open
for friendly embassies or tribute bearers.

The Yu-mon passage, or Jade Gate, so called because here tolls were
levied upon the costly jade brought from Khotan, marks the natural
passage from Central Asia into China, and all the geographical indications
contained in the very ancient portion of the Shu-king, known as the
Tribute of Yu, harmonize with the supposition that the progenitors of the
"hundred families " of China first passed through this narrow tongue of
land. If at any time they had ceased to occupy it, the whole of China
would have been thrown open to invading hordes ; but there is no reason
to suppose the first settlers to have had their footsteps dogged by the
swarming nomads who became a danger in later ages. Probably the
Jade Gate stood open till the rumours of the fertile land ahead had brought
in the rear-guard of the national procession ; after which purely natural
causes made the isolation of the colonists in their new home even more
complete and prolonged than that of the dwellers in the Nile Valley.

Much of what is singular in the civilization both of Egypt and China
may be explained by the isolation of a progressive people, developing all
its native capabilities without external help or hindrance. A nation does
not become civilized unless it possesses capacity for progress, but for
civilization to be either stable or stationary it must be homogeneous, and
no State has hitherto had a sufficiently robust and varied power of assimi-
lation to retain its own characteristics unimpaired, while freely admitting
alien elements into its system. Where such elements are rigorously ex-
cluded, the rate of progress gradually slackens, and the rare phenomenon
of a civilized stationary State is produced. But the policy of exclusiveness,
advocated in the interest of conservatism by so many primitive legislators,
cannot be consistently enforced, unless by favour of circumstances ; and
the geographical and political situation of Egypt/like that of China, was
a necessary condition of the virtual isolation to which she owed her im-
munity from change.

Even under the Romans, when international communications had been
systematized, common fame and learned travellers still spoke of Egypt as
a land difficult of access to strangers, and the difficulty cannot have been
less in prehistoric ages. Unless, therefore, the first dwellers in the Nile

1 This province was formerly included in Shensi, a fact to be remembered when we
read of Tatar raids upon the latter, now central district.

PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS. 19

Valley were autochthonous, we can only account for the seclusion, which
had so much influence on the industrial history of both land and people,
by assuming the first colonists to have entered their settlements by a gate
which could so close behind them as to intercept any backward rumours
of peace and plenty, likely to invite a continuous stream of immigration.

It has generally been taken for granted that the colonists of the Nile
Valley, if of Asiatic origin, must have entered Africa by way of the
isthmus of Suez, and must have proceeded gradually up
the course of the stream ; while if of African extraction,
of course their progress must have taken the opposite
direction. Both hypotheses, however, fail to give any explanation of the
ancient fame of Abydos and the traditional importance of This, the seat of
the monarchy of Menes and capital of the First Dynasty. And a little
consideration will show that there are reasons against completely disre-
garding the hints of native tradition on these points. In the first place,
we do not find within historic times that the inhabitants of the Thinite
nome possessed any special facilities for disseminating reports to their own
glory, while the neighbouring splendour of Thebes would have led an
inventive chronicler to place the first seat of the monarchy there, if not at
Memphis. In the second place, no Egyptian tradition points to the Delta
as the starting-point of national growth ; the Egyptians do not think of
themselves as having ever lived anywhere else than in Egypt ; and all the
evidence is in favour of the national type having developed and become
fixed after, not before, their settlement in the valley of the Nile. But if
the stream of immigration had proceeded by the Isthmus of Suez, what
was to interrupt its continuance ? and how, in the face of a continuous
immigration, could the language and physique of the settlers have become
so sharply marked off from those of the wandering tribes which, on this
hypothesis, must be so near akin to them ?

Another argument on the same side was pointed out by Professor Owen :
the domestic animals of Asia, the camel and the horse, are unknown to
the earlier monuments — a fact almost irreconcilable with the hypothesis of
immigration by Suez, though not necessarily conclusive in favour of an
African origin. All speculation on these subjects must be in the main
guess-work, but there is nothing in history inconsistent with the conjecture,
that long before the dawn of history, men, more or less remotely of the
same parentage as the Akkadian inhabitants of Chaldaea and the hundred
families of China, spread slowly round the coast of the Arabian Peninsula,
and crossed over into Africa at one or other, or perhaps at all, of the suc-
cessive points where the Red Sea narrows enough to tempt adventurous
mariners. Without going so far as Heeren, who placed the cradle of the
Semitic race in South Arabia,1 it may be admitted that the fertile portions

1 This view, which has been adopted by other writers, was advanced before the anti-
quity of South Arabian civilization was established, both by that of the earliest Yemenite
inscriptions and by the tokens of prehistoric contact between Babylonia and Egypt ;
but the furthest point reached by an advancing race is always that where its primitive
characteristics linger longest ; and supposing Kushites to have preceded Semites in

20 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

of that favoured country would invite colonization long before the Desert
of Sinai. National migrations seldom proceed as the crow flies, and the
fact that the most ancient colonists of Arabia set their faces southward
down the Persian Gulf would of itself account for the pressure of a similar
stream, at a later date, northwards up the Red Sea, or westward across it.

There are three separate chances for the colonization of Egypt before
the isthmus would be reached. 1 Immigrants crossing the Straits of Bab-el-
Mandeb would probably lose their way in Nubia before reaching the Nile ;
yet some of the Kushite tribes of Northern Africa must have made their
way in here, and by following the course of the Atbara or the Blue Nile,
it would not have been impossible for them to reach the upper part of
the Nile Valley. The track is not an obvious one, yet we gather that it
must have been followed at least once at a much later date, and is there-
fore not naturally impracticable.2 The southern tribes, to whom the
Egyptians gave the name of Kushite, probably entered Africa by this
route when the pressure of the Semitic Arabs led to a general dispersion
of their race. But the fact that Kushites are not mentioned in Egyptian
monuments before the Twelfth Dynasty, is almost conclusive against any
considerable influx of such tribes prior to, or contemporaneous with, the
settlement of Egypt itself.

The direct route from Egypt to the Red Sea in after days was from
Kopt to Kosseir or Berenice, and either of three chances again would
bring immigrants by this into the valley of the Nile : if, resolving to cross
the sea at its full width, they happened to land at this spot ; or if, after
crossing by the straits, they had followed the coast in quest of an opening
into the inland regions ; or, lastly, if parties from a coasting vessel landed
there to begin exploring the interior. Arab tradition regards Kopt as very
ancient, and the Egyptians themselves were of the same opinion, for a
medical papyrus is said to have been discovered there in the reign of King
Khafra, which proves that its importance dated from the early days of the

Arabia, it is at the south-west extremity that they would linger longest and in greatest
force, just as in Spain the Iberians were driven to the Pyrenees and the Kelts in France
and England to the borders of the furthest maritime provinces. On any hypothesis, the
mosi ancient Semitic tribes are those which would have most affinity with the early
Kushite people. The language and physique of the tribes of Northern Arabia are supposed
to represent most closely the primitive type of Semitism, and accordingly Professor Sayce
and others assume the stock to have proceeded thence into Mesopotamia. But the relation
between the so-called Hamitic and Semitic languages is that of elder and younger
brother, so that the Bedouins of Arabia would still owe their origin to some branch or
offshoot from the stock that was drifting towards Egypt.

1 The late Vicomte de Rouge, in his memoir on the monuments of the first Six
Dynasties, recognised the possibility of two of these routes: "Nous ne pourrions
accepter la donnee d'une origine ethiopienne pour la civilization de 1'Egypte quedans ce
sens ; qu'une portion des families voisines, faisant partie de ces deux races [i.e. the
Kushites and the Hamites of S. Asia] serait arrivee en meme temps en Afrique par
1' Isthmus" de Suez, par les cotes de la Mer Rouge ou meme par le detroit de Bab-el-
Mandeb." {Me moires de F Academic des Inscriptions et Bellcs-Lettres, vol. xxv. pt. 2,
p. 227.)

2 Some centuries ago the Scharqieh Arabs are said by tradition to have entered Africa
from the Hejaz ; and Lepsius, in proof of the fact, cites the presence in two valleys
near Barkal of a certain tree, which is indigenous to Arabia, and met with nowhere else.

PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS. 21

monarchy.1 Ancient expeditions from Egypt to the Sinaitic Peninsula
as well as to the land of Punt used Kopt as their starting-point, and
the natural explanation of its position among the most ancient settle-
ments of the country would be that some prehistoric expedition from the
Red Sea into Egypt found its goal and resting-place there. It is probable
that Egypt, like America, had more than one discoverer ; and if some of
these have disappeared and been absorbed amongst the native tribes, the
most fortunate and most adventurous will have survived to found the
Egyptian nation.

The original settlers of Abydos, from whom sprang the founder of the
Thinite Dynasty, may, however, have entered Egypt neither from Kosseir
nor from the south, but by a more inevitable route which is yet not that
of the isthmus. Southern Arabia was in all human probability colonized
from the coast and the Red Sea explored by boat. Some Assyriologists
believe that the hard stone used in the monuments of Gudea was derived
from the Sinaitic Peninsula, which is only credible on the supposition of
its having been conveyed by water. The question turns upon a name,
and while opinion is divided on the subject it cannot be treated as proved
that Babylonian vessels sailed as far as the Gulfs of Akaba and Suez at or
before the time assigned to Menes. But there is no difficulty in believing
that an exploring party, passing Kosseir and sighting Cape Ras Mohammed
as a boundary on the right, should land at Myos Hormos, where at most
three or four miles of passable hills would separate them from each of two
predestined caravan tracks, tboth leading as directly as the nature of the
country will admit to that bend in the course of the Nile which brings it
nearest to the Red Sea ; the point where, after flowing northward from
Karnak and Kopt, it begins at Keneh, the ancient Caenopolis, to trend
westward towards Farshoot.

Naturally travellers who first touch the Nile at Keneh (which is just
opposite to Denderah) would follow the stream on its downward course,
which also for a few miles seems to continue their former line of march,
so that the Seventh or Thinite nome includes exactly the ground most
likely to be taken up by the first settlers arriving by land from the east.
At a short distance from the ancient capital, where low hills mark the
boundary between the inundation and the desert, the holy city of Abydos
was planted, from the earliest times the chief seat in Upper Egypt of the
worship of Osiris ; and it was here, perhaps, that the first immigrants
took refuge as the waters rose above the level. Egyptologists whose
views are based upon original study of the native texts, unbiassed by pre-
conceived theories or traditions, find no indications of a probable advance
through the isthmus ; on the contrary, the one indication which might
have seemed favourable to such a theory — the early development of the
mines in the Sinaitic Peninsula — is shown to have no such significance,
since at a much later date these mines were habitually reached by sea.

1 Nearly, or quite, the earliest royal name yet met with was discovered in this neigh-
bourhood.

22 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

The story of an Egyptian Sinbad, ascribed to the Ramessid period,
begins with his setting sail upon the sea in order to journey towards the
mines of the king ; and it is upon an island, on the course of navigators
bound for the mines, that he is shipwrecked and meets with the serpent
who is lord of all the treasures of the East. That traffic from the ports of
Egypt on the Red Sea should have taken a northward direction at a still
earlier date than that which, from the Fifth Dynasty onward, connected
Egypt with the land of Punt, is a fact of the greatest importance, and the
views which it suggests are confirmed by several circumstances ; that the
kings are always described as of " Upper and Lower Egypt," that Upper
Egypt is considered the " front " and Lower Egypt the " back " of the
country; that the division into nomes was much more ancient and com-
plete in the former than the latter district, while the settlement and cultiva-
tion of the country had evidently made earlier and more rapid progress in
the south than in the north. All this tends to show that Egyptian civili-
zation began in Upper Egypt, with the seat of government at This or
Abydos ; and as it is physically impossible that civilization should have
begun in the swamps of the Upper Nile, and morally improbable that it
should have begun in mid-stream, the preferable hypothesis is that it was
brought in from the south by the most civilized dwellers on the coast
in that direction.

It is of course possible that Lower Egypt may have been settled, as
the received hypothesis assumes the whole country to have been, from
the north by the peninsula of Sinai ; but the site of Memphis might also
be reached from the east by settlers, starting from the same landing-place
at Myos Hormos as the colonists of This, and following the hill-track
which at the present day leads past the convents of St. Anthony and
St. Paul.

Proof positive of course is not to be hoped for in such a matter, but
the presumption in favour of colonization from the Red Sea is strengthened
by the otherwise unexplained fact that the sacred " Land of the gods "
recognised in later times by the Egyptians, is localized neither in the
heights of Nubia nor the plains of the Delta, but in the Kingdom of Punt
on the Arabian or Somali coast. The connection with this sacred land
was by no means exclusively traditional or imaginary. The first expedi-
tions of Egyptian kings1 — aiming at more than war or the acquisition of
building materials — were to this sacred land, some knowledge of which
must have been preserved, or at least renewed, from time to time by stray
traders ; and considerations advanced by one of the most cautious and
competent of Egyptologists, help to explain why this could scarcely fail.
to be the case.

The Egyptian monuments show the Puna or men of Punt to be red-

1 Besides those of the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Eighteenth Dynasties, Prof. Schiaparelli
has found (1892), in a Sixth Dynasty tomb, mention of two expeditions sent by Assa
(Fifth Dynasty) to the land of Pun, and by Pepi II. (Sixth Dynasty) to "the land of the
Holy Spirits." Academy, July 8, 1893. Recueil dc Travaux, xiv. p. 186.

PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS. 23

skinned like the Egyptians, though of a darker shade. These Puna,
Lepsius proceeds, with some plausibility, to identify with the Phoenicians ;l
and if this view be accepted, instead of deriving either Egyptian or
Babylonian civilization from each other, or from South Arabia, we shall
see in the latter a sort of half-way house, the connecting link between the
two distant settlements where the race could found a kingdom and a
nation. It is, however, rash to build too much in any case upon the
supposed resemblance or identity of a single proper name ; and Lepsius'
identification of the Puna with the men of Punt has been challenged on
the ground that the / in the latter name could not possibly have dropped
out. The latest historian of the Phoenicians takes this view,2 and on
this, as on most other points concerning which the learned are divided,
the laity will not find it difficult to hold their judgment in suspense.

It is the more needful to do this because, when the materials for scientific
certainty are wanting, specialists are not quite impartial in their choice
of a working hypothesis. Apart from the involuntary, quasi-patriotic
instinct, which predisposes the Egyptologist to believe that Chaldaea was
taught or colonized by Egyptians, while the Sumerian scholar reverses
the relation, it is inevitable that the masters of any one branch of investi-
gation should attach most importance to the evidence elicited in the
course of their own studies. When obscure points of history have to be
elucidated, the Hebrew scholar knows at first hand all the light that can
be thrown on them by the language and literature of that people ; and
the same thing is true of the student of Egyptian and Chinese and of the
Assyriologists, all of whom necessarily attach more weight to the circum-
stantial knowledge they possess in their own departments, than to the
comparatively isolated pieces of information which each may communicate
to the other. In time, no doubt, the results of all separate lines of inquiry
are thrown into the common fund, and all established facts assume their
proper place and proportion. But there is an interval during which those
who are themselves most actively engaged in extending the domain of
knowledge in one direction are least likely to appreciate the full value of
similar labours directed against an opposite corner of the dark continent
of the general ignorance. These considerations do not at all detract
from the value or credibility of each scholar's positive contributions to
historic science ; on the contrary, the ignorant layman, in some cases, may
have the advantage of justly admiring at the same time two learned men,
who do not admire each other at all.

Whether the Phoenicians and the Puna bore the same name or not,
there can be no doubt as to the relationship between the latter and the
Egyptians. One of the most extraordinary merits of the Egyptian monu-
ments is the spirit and fidelity with which they represent the features and

1 Nubische Gram mat ik mit einer Einleitung iiber die Volker und Sprachen Afrikas.
R. Lepsius (Berlin, 1880). Introduction, p. 95 ff. See also Hommel, Die Vorsemiti-
schen Kulturen in sEgypten und Baby lonien (Leipzig, 1882), p. 125 ff.

2 Dr. Pietschmann (Gesch. der Phonizier^ p. 122). It is suggested that Phoenix might
be a Grsecised version of Fench or Fenchu, the Egyptian name for the people.

24 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

costumes of the different foreigners with whom they came in contact.
The evidence of the wall-paintings therefore has the value of contemporary
documents of the highest class, and it points to the conclusion already
advocated, upon different grounds by Lepsius. Mr. Flinders Petrie, who
prepared a series of ethnographic casts and photographs from the Egyptian
monuments, writes of the collection as follows :T —

" The first striking point is the strong resemblance of the people of Pun or Punt (on
both shores of the south part of the Red Sea) to the Egyptians of the higher class.
That there were two races in early Egypt seems assured by the very different types met
with on the earliest tombs ; one with an aquiline nose and fine expression, the other
prognathous, with a snouty nose. The aquiline type is identical with the people of
Pun ; the coarser examples of one with the coarser examples of the other, and the finer
examples with the finer ; they hang together throughout in a way which seems beyond
any casual resemblance. The head of a Punite chief is identical in every detail of feature
and expression with that of Seti II. ; and the heads of other Punites parallel the cha-
racteristic heads of a son of Khufu and his servants. When we remember the peaceful
relation of the Egyptians with the Punites, and the respect which they always showed
to the people of the " divine land," it seems far from impossible that the civilization of
Egypt might be due to a Punite race penetrating to Abydos by the Kosseir road, and so
originating the early dynasties in the midst of the Nile Valley. At least this must be
borne in mind in all future speculations on the primitive Egyptians. It seems not un-
likely that another development of the Punite race may have taken place by a tribe
passing further up the Red Sea and penetrating to the Mediterranean. Then they
spread up the Syrian coast and formed 'the Poem or Phoenicians, and in the western part
of the Mediterranean became the Punic race of history. On comparing the maritime
Pulista or Philistines in these photographs, we see at once a very close resemblance to
the Punites. These resemblances are such that a head of each race might readily be
two different versions of the same individual as portrayed by two different sculptors ; and
their dissimilarity to the figures of any other race is clear and certain."

On the monuments the men of Punt are always represented in the same
red colour as the men of Egypt ; the lighter yellowish tint used for
Egyptian women seems to indicate that the race was once naturally white,
like the Kabyles and Berbers of the present day, whose customs and
language connect them with the Hamitic group, but the peculiar red tint
met with in South Arabia and Egypt may naturally be accounted for by
climatic influences. The Hottentots who retain it have also always
been exposed to an African sun. The resemblance between the men of
Punt and the Pulista is not conclusive as to the identity of the former
with the Phoenicians, as advocates of the Semitic character of the Phoe-
nicians question the closeness of their relationship to the Philistines.
But the presence both in South Arabia and Syria of a race closely re-
sembling the Egyptians in feature must be taken as an unquestionable
fact, and the simplest way of accounting for it is to suppose all three to
be branches from a common stem, while there is no reason, a priori^ for
rejecting the tradition which places the root of one branch at the head
of the Persian Gulf, a locality which is at least possible for the other
two.

1 Bab. and Or. Record, vol. ii. p. 135. The subject is discussed at length by Lieblein,
Handel und Schiffahrt auf dem rothen Meere in alien Zeiten, pp. 10-75.

PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS. 25

The earliest commerce of Chaldaea was doubtless that between the
Hamitic colony in Arabia and the kindred they had left, just as the
Egyptians traded back to the same point, whence the obvious temptation
to look upon it as the nursery of both. It may be that the great traders
of the Old World, whose vessels ranged all along the Persian Gulf, the
Red Sea, and even as far as the shores of India, never quite lost sight of
the kindred stock which found its way to Africa before them, though there
can have been little systematic intercourse till the renewal of communica-
tion under the Eleventh Dynasty.

In the royal monuments and private tombs belonging to the Third,
Fourth, and Fifth Dynasties, the most casual observation shows two distinct
types of feature : l the Pharaoh and the wealthy courtier or " royal cousin "
commemorated has not infrequently features of an Arab or Semitic cast,
with high cheek-bones and full aquiline nose, while the crowd of retainers
and workmen of all sorts who are represented as employed in his service
have uniformly short, blunt features and heads of the same shape as that
made familiar by the monuments after the conventional type had become
fixed, though the outline is less sharp and slender. The original of the
famous statue at the museum of Gizeh — which reminds Britons of John
Bright and Germans of Prince Bismarck, and his countrymen of the near-
est village headman— did not belong to the Semitic-looking aristocracy ;
and the king's son Ra-hotep approaches to the sturdier plebeian type with
its startling modernness and suggestion of rough power. The earliest
inhabitants of Babylonia, as represented on the monuments of Gudea,
resemble the portion of the early Egyptian population represented by the
Sheik el Beled, with features more of an European than an Arab type.
But physically the Egyptians of later history seem, to a mere physiognomist,
as much Semitized as the later Syrians and Babylonians are Hamitized, if
that word may be used to describe the influence of a black-haired, partially
Turanian people upon the fair race with aquiline features which seems best
to deserve the name of proto-Semitic.

While Egyptian tradition allows us to connect Egypt with the land of
Punt, the cuneiform records connect the island of Bahrein on the coast
of Arabia with the kingdoms of Southern Mesopotamia ; and as the conti-
nental caravan-tracks started inland from the opposite port, there can be no
doubt that ships from South Arabia and the Euphrates met here, as well as,
ultimately, those from India and the Red Sea ; and we thus work our way
back from the Nile to the Persian Gulf as we do from China to Khotan.
Khotan and the Persian Gulf are the two points between which primitive
civilization must have had its origin : the only question is whether we
must suppose it to have had three origins or one.

There is nothing more difficult to account for than beginnings, and one
secret of the popularity of the doctrine of evolution is that it diminishes the

1 There are also two distinct modes of sepulture, the body in the oldest tombs being
sometimes recumbent and sometimes bent with the knees up to the chin, like those
found in the jar-like earthenware coffins of the most ancient sites in South Babylonia.

26 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

number of inexplicable origins. We have to account for the beginnings
of art, letters, and philosophy in Egypt and Babylonia, and
caiprowenf ~ tllat °^ letters an<^ philosophy in China, all of a kindred sort,
and at dates so far as we can tell almost equally remote.
Three separate origins are hard to account for in themselves, and become
almost inexplicable when we note the resemblance of the results that
would have to be traced to three separate and independent chains of
causation. On the other hand, the intrinsic difficulty of a single origin is
minimised, if there is any reason to believe in the sudden advent of a new
condition, potent enough to account for the marked variation then arising,
and in the nature of things not susceptible of repetition, so that the sub-
sequent cessation of development upon the same scale may be explained
at the same time as its single occurrence.

We have seen that the Egyptian people at its earliest included two
distinct physical types, and the same remark applies, though less con-
spicuously, to the earliest figures of Sumerian art. Now one of the strong-
est arguments in favour of a prehistoric connection between the Chinese
and the Akkadians (or ancient Chaldaeans of Turanian speech) is also an
argument against all the inhabitants of the first settled districts in Mesopo-
tamia having been of the same race. From the earliest times the Chinese
have been in the habit of describing themselves as the " black-haired "
people, while the ancient Akkadians use the substantially similar designa-
tion of " black-headed."

The name Ham itself is considered by some to be equivalent to the
native name for Egypt, Kam-t (demotic Kemi), from the root kam, black.
This has generally been understood to refer to the black earth of the Nile
Valley ; but if the Egyptians were akin to the black-headed race of Babylonia,
it is possible that they may have brought the name with them, and have
transferred its application from the people to the country when its signifi-
cance in the former case had ceased.

Jn each case it seems impossible to account for the adoption of such a
descriptive term to indicate nationality, unless those who used it were in
the habit of thinking of themselves as possessing this among other notes
of superiority to some less civilized people of a different colouring. But
before the advent of the red-haired barbarians of the West, we are at a loss
to imagine what light-haired people the Chinese can have known, after their
arrival in China, to have caused them to adopt such a distinctive appel-
lation. The birthplace of the Chinese is matter of conjecture, but the
habitat of the Akkadians (or Sumerians) when they called themselves the
black-headed people is known to us, and known to be within reach of, or
rather in immediate contact with, another race which is not uniformly
black-haired. Sir Henry Layard l speaks of " that fair complexion and
light hair which distinguish the Jews in the East from the darker races
among whom they dwell ; " and in the mixed Jewish colony of East
London, which includes representatives of the race from nearly every
1 Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylon, vol. i. p. 151.

PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS. 27

country in the Old World, the reddish, fair-haired type is still far from un-
common. The Egyptian monuments contain several examples of what we
consider Semitic features combined with Aryan colouring, that is with blue
eyes and yellowish hair, and, what is still more to the purpose, the same
traits are still met with among the Kabyles, whose " blonde complexion,
large blue eyes, ruddy hair, and high straight forehead," strike an English
visitor1 as essentially European, while French observers consider the as-
pect of the same tribes to be "decidedly Germanic." The existence of
a fair-complexioned race in ancient Palestine is also insisted on, indepen-
dently, by Professor Sayce, who maintains the Amorites belonged to it.
The blonde Finns, who still speak a language akin to Akkadian, perhaps
come nearest to the primitive ancient type.

The fact that the non-Semitic Akkadians thought of themselves, as a
race, as being first and most obviously black-headed suggests the idea that
the earliest precursors of the Semitic-speaking peoples with whom they
came in contact were normally light or red-haired, like the Caucasian
stocks of Northern Europe. Or rather, as has been pointed out several
times of late, the so-called Semites are not a race at all, but only members
of the Caucasian family whose language has received a particular kind of
development.

The one unique cause which may be suggested for the development of
those new human qualities or aptitudes to which the domestic civilizations
owe their brilliancy and duration is the intercourse between the black and
the fair-haired race when both were in the primitive vigour and purity of
youth. The first cross between two strong and original races might
certainly have produced a stock, combining some of the qualities of both
parents, and having the persistency of a true species. We do not know
that it was so, and though an hypothesis which cannot be verified is also
secure against disproof, it is rather as a possible explanation of the real
facts than as itself a fact of intrinsic probability that the hypothesis com-
mends itself to those minds in which facts cannot hang together without
the help of some thread of theory.

There seems to be a period when the intellect of mankind runs to gram-
mar, when rudimentary philosophers devote themselves to word-making and
budding logicians to phrase-building. If this were not so, philosophy and
science must have remained for ever dumb ; but to take effect upon the
common language of a race, this period must fall when the population is
still tolerably compact. A separation following shortly after a burst of
philological innovation — such as the invention of genders and the sub-
stitution of suffixes for words — would give occasion to diversities of
development exactly similar to those which exist between Egyptian,
Assyrian, and the Aryan tongues and the older varieties of Turanian or
Finno-Ugric speech.

It is now suggested that the northern or European branches of the
primitive white race retained this archaic form of speech, that the bar-
1 Mr. Grant Allen. Contemporary Review, April, 1888.

28 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

barons tongue spoken by descendants of the divine Pelasgi in the days
of Herodotus may have been of this type, and that Vannic, Hittite, and
Etruscan inscriptions are to be interpreted by its analogies. Greek legend
deals reverently with these precursors of the white man's greatness ; and
after a period of ignorant faith and ignorant scepticism, there is some hope
now that the historical foundations of the legend may be unearthed by
scientific criticism.1 The branches of the white race on the Mediterranean
received little direct stimulus from the more advanced civilization de-
veloped in Babylonia, and with few exceptions, they did not retain a
separate and independent existence. The branches of the white race in
Africa, which adopted Hamitic modes of speech, have been in contact
with inferior races and tongues, and have consequently been less com-
pletely submerged, but they have not advanced in civilization since they
disembarked from Yemen or from Rhodes or Crete.

The physical perfection and intellectual capacity of this race make its
historical obscurity a problem, unless we admit that as a general rule it
takes two races to. make a great people. We have seen that such an
explanation is possible in the case of Egypt and Babylonia, and the first
brilliant outburst of civilization in Europe did in fact take place when the
fair-haired Homeric heroes came in contact with offshoots from the earlier
stock, which had, as we shall see, carried many of the characteristic traits
of Hamitic civilization along the shores of the Mediterranean and ulti-
mately into the remotest ends of Spain.

The plausibility of this explanation is increased when we remember that
the third stage or period of civilization, in which we now live, began with
a similar clash of races, after the barbarians of the North encountered their
long-separated kinsmen, whose complexions had been darkened by the
sun and a more or less considerable infusion of Hamitic blood, so that
even their features seemed as foreign to the new-comers as their language
and their cosmopolitan culture. In the same way it may be argued, that
the Semitic kingdoms of Western Asia owed their greatness to the ad-
mixture of alien influences derived from the older race. Semitic Babylonia
and Palestine borrowed from the Akkadians and the Egyptians all the
humaner features of their legislation, and the humanity of Moslem law
represents the latter influence filtered through Jewish tradition. Assyria,
which borrowed less, had a harsher civil code as well as a more ferocious
military temper.

The genealogists of the tenth chapter of Genesis (vv. 6-20) believed that
there were four branches of the Hamitic stock, the identifiable represen-
tatives of which are clearly differentiated on the Egyptian monuments
as possessing delicate features midway between the Aryan and Semitic
peoples in type, and a complexion neither black, white, nor yellow, but

1 C. Pauli, Eine vor-Griechische Inschrift von Lemnos. This inscription is accom-
panied by a profile, remarkable for the same bullet-headedness as the Gudea statues of
Tel-loh. Craniologically this type is described as brachycephalic, short-headed, like the
dark Kelts of Auvergne.

PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS. 29

red. Only three of these brandies have their further ramifications traced.
The first place is given to Gush, who is conceived to be the father of the
tribes of South Arabia and of the founder of a kingdom in. the land of
Shinar, whose first cities were " Babel, and Erech,and Accad, and Calneh."
Mizraim is the second son, and, rather curiously, the men of Egypt are
made to father some few of the inhabitants of Palestine, who for one
reason or another1 are not counted among the sons of Canaan. Among
the races who are so counted, we find the Sidonians, the Hittites, the
Amorites, and the Hamathites, though the Sidonians of history should be
placed, after their tongue, among the sons of Shem, while the white com-
plexion of the Amorites casts a doubt on the nearness of their relation to
the red-hued Hamites.

The majority of the stocks named very possibly belonged both in
speech and appearance to the type of which the Egyptians are the mo?t
familiar representatives. But the Biblical writer also included among the
sons of Ham families speaking a language akin to that of the yellow or
Turanian race, and others whose languages are unknown or anomalous
and whose complexion appears to have been white. And the curious
thing is that a comparative study of institutions and national temperament
carried on independently, would lead to a tentative generalization very
like that of the genealogist, and open to just the same difficulty, that it
brings together men belonging by language and colour to three apparently
quite distinct groups. The Georgians and the Basques, the Akkadians
and the Hittites, the Egyptians and the Berbers may all be included
among the sons of Ham if we are content to give as wide an extension to
the name as that authorized in the book of Genesis.

The Biblical genealogies do not represent a minute local tradition, but
rather the best judgment of the best-informed men of their time as to the
relationships and affinities of contemporary nations. And this is just what
constitutes their value ; for if different nations speak languages which pre-
philological observers can see to be akin, and have usages and features
so conspicuously of the same type, as to suggest a common origin in spite
of political separation and antagonism, this is good evidence as far as it
goes, and may be accepted in the absence of facts on the other side. The
various Biblical genealogies which make Canaan alternately the son of
Ham and the son of Noah, show that Ham was considered to belong to
an earlier generation than Shem and Japhet, which agrees with the indica-
tions of history. But if we accept the legend of three brothers, Canaan,
Shem, and Japhet, as representing the division of stocks contemporaneous
with the spread of a Semitic people in Mesopotamia, we must adopt some
other classification for the older world, which the book of Genesis recog-
nises as subsisting between Adam and Noah.

The genealogical fiction breaks down when we attempt to carry it back
to a single starting-point, because we can scarcely conceive three sons of

1 Very possibly from their having been longest tributary to Egypt after the conquests
of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

30 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

one father as being of different colours. As a matter of fact a new breed
is not derived by descent from one parent, but selected, through a series
of generations, from out of a whole stock. The primitive white, red, and
yellow stocks differentiated themselves independently, and their separate
existence is one of the first facts of history. The civilization which grew
up in the centre of their respective spheres of influence has the common
features which we vainly seek in their ancestry. It contains elements
which we have subsequent reason for thinking to be characteristic of one
or other of the three, rather than originally common to all, and in its com-
plete form it is so advanced and admirable that Western Europe hesitates
to believe that it can have been the creation of any race but the white.
Apart from this prejudice, which has a sort of justification in the later
history of the world, all the evidence would lead us to believe that the
Mediterranean branch of the primitive race, of which we know nothing
except that it was white, contributed less than either of the others to the
brilliant complex of archaic civilization, and it certainly produced no
States or empires comparable with those of ancient Egypt or Babylonia.

The " black-headed " men of Sumer and Akkad, whose speech was of
the same type as that of the yellow-skinned, black-haired Chinese, re-
sembled in feature and genius, as well as in language, the white men who
wrought metals in the mountains of Armenia and the Caucasus and spread
to the islands of the Mediterranean ; and they resembled in feature and
genius, though not in language, the dominant element in the Egyptian
people. The national type of the Egyptians, in spite of their mixed origin,
became very permanent and sharply defined. The ancestors of the
Chinese may have avoided any alien admixture in Western Asia by the
direction of their migration, and they have since only absorbed various
autochthonous savages and Tatar tribes, both elements inferior to them-
selves in civilization and intelligence.

Two craniological types are found among the black-haired, white-skinned
people, with languages akin to those of the Finns and the Akkadians, who
are scattered along the Mediterranean between the Caucasus and Spain ;
otherwise it would be easy and satisfactory to see in them representatives
of the bullet-headed element in the mixed populations of Egypt and
Babylonia, to the latter of which they are linguistically akin. But unlike
the supposed Pelasgian of Lemnos, the Basques, ihe Armenians, and the
obscure remnants of a primitive population in Asia Minor are all high-
headed. Again, we find traces of dark and fair bullet-heads, who agree
only in talking a language akin to the Finnish, and long dark heads who
do the same, together with long fair heads who talk pure Semitic, and
round fair heads, using the earlier form of speech preserved in Egypt — all
before the dark Semites and fair Aryans of comparatively familiar ancient
history.

All these elements exist, but the evidence of their existence does not
of itself suggest any genealogical grouping for them. They can conse-
quently be brought into any order suggested by a preconceived theory.

PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS. 31

But as the differentiation of clearly defined varieties of the human race is
about the most remote and obscure of prehistoric facts, it is safer to re-
frain from all genealogical hypotheses. We may have to borrow names
derived from ethnological classifications to distinguish stocks possessing
certain common institutions, and no doubt the distribution of charac-
teristic institutions is one element to be considered by ethnologists ; but
the bearing of institutions on the history of civilization, or of social and
economic development, is a separate subject which may be considered
quite apart from open questions as to the physical history of races.

The first serious attempt to connect Chinese and Babylonian civilization
was made by M. Terrien de la Couperie, who adduces evidence of vary-
ing degrees of conclusiveness to show that the language and the legends,
the written character, the astronomy, the arts, agriculture and domestic
economy of China all show traces of a prehistoric community of origin
with those of the first inhabitants of Babylonia. To mention only a few
of the most striking coincidences, the legend of Sargon, one of the oldest
and most widely diffused of folk tales — a late form of which is versified in
Mr. Morris's The Man born to be King — is told of two Chinese worthies,
the mythical emperor, Shinnung, and How-tseih, another supposed founder
of civilization. The same emperor is also said to have used signs like
tongues of fire to record facts ; while another mythical personage is said
by early Chinese authors to have ascertained from observation of the
marks on the soil of claws of birds and animals, "that objects could be
distinguished from one another by lines." And, in fact, it would be difficult
to describe the appearance of the so-called cuneiform characters better
than by comparing them to the footprints of birds on sand or snow. It is
possible to see in the oldest Chinese characters resemblances to the corre-
sponding cuneiforms, and the unintelligible ancient Chinese classic, the
Yi King, acquires a dim promise of significance when it is proposed to re-
gard it as a syllabary or collection of lexical fragments, the purpose and
meaning of which has been forgotten while their antiquity made them still
objects of reverence. The early Chinese names of the four cardinal points
also much resemble those of Chaldaea, with the difference that they dis-
played a shifting of a quarter of the circle. The Egyptians and Chinese
spoke as we naturally think, of the South as in front, the North behind, the
West at the right, and the East at the left.

In Babylonia the same names were used, but the speaker is supposed to
be looking to the South-west, with his back to the North-east, as is proved
by an astronomical tablet recently translated, where it is stated "The
South is Elam, the North is Akkad, on the right is Akkad, on the left
Elam." The metrical systems of China and Babylonia also have points
in common ; the use of the sixty years cycle, the estimate of 120 years as
the ideal length of life, the names of some of the constellations, the use of
divining rods, and a variety of similar traits suggest either affinity or inter-
course.

The " twelve pastors " who are mentioned in the Canon of Shun disap-

32 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

pear from later history, and are supposed also to be a reminiscence of
Babylonia. According to the Bamboo books, in the i25th year of the
reign of Yao, " the superintendent of works made a tour of inspection
through the twelve provinces ; " but the division is evidently invented to
account for the twelve pastors, since only nine provinces are recognised in
the later " Tribute of Yu," the earliest document possessing any approach to
authority as to the geography of the empire. M. de la Couperie also pro-
poses to identify a number of Chinese legendary names with those of more,
or less historical personages in Chaldsea, as the fifth mythical emperor of
China, Nai Hwangti, with Nakhunte.

He contends that wheat was probably introduced into China from Baby-
lonia, where, on the whole, botanists tend to suppose it to have been
indigenous ; the use of bricks for building is another distinctively Mesopo-
tamian trait, not likely to have been independently developed in China.
The Chinese, as already mentioned, call themselves the black-haired people
and their country the Middle Kingdom, both designations having a signifi-
cance in Babylonia which they lack in China. Their earliest records men-
tion an officer called " President of the Four Mountains," a title which soon
became obsolete, but in which M. de la Couperie sees a reminiscence of
the title " King of the Four Regions" borne by the sovereigns of Chaldaea.
The same writer believes that the appellation of the " hundred families "
given to the immigrant race in their own literature, rests on the misreading
of an old character, which he understands as signifying " the Bak tribes/'
an ethnic name which might be connected with Bactria, and the many other
local names in Western Asia with the same root. Chinese scholarship,
however, is not lightly to be set aside : and unless the altered reading of
Peh Sing (the hundred families) were accepted by learned natives, we
should be more disposed to retain the ancient rendering, and still see in that
an evidence of Western origin, and a reminiscence of some primitive organi-
zation, other than the feudal monarchy, resembling the " Royal Tens " of
Egypt or the Hundreds who formed the Senates of Phoenicia and Carth-
age.

Much labour has been spent on a comparison of the earliest forms of
Chinese and Akkadian ideograms ; but there is so much room for differ-
ence of opinion as to what constitutes a resemblance between one clumsy,
conventional scrawl and another, or between either and the real objects
they are supposed to denote, that no very definite results can be hoped for
in this direction. There are no Grimm's laws in draughtmanship. But
the comparison between Akkadian and Chinese roots, upon which Mr.
Ball is engaged,1 promises more satisfactory results, and meanwhile we
may be content to treat the connection as a probability which may any day
be converted into a certainty. The probability is strengthened by the
similarity rof intellectual and moral temperament between the Chinese
and the Hamitic stocks with the early domestic civilization about to be
described.

1 Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archxology^ vol. xii. pt. I, xiii. pts. I, 6, etc.

.PREHISTORIC PROBLEMS. 33

For anything we can see to the - contrary, hieroglyphs developing into
syllabic writing may be a purely Turanian invention, for the Chinese are
not less literary than the Egyptians. And it is a point in favour of the
wholly or partially agglutinative character, of the parent speech of the
literary race, that hieroglyphic writing can be more easily used to represent
such a language than one with a developed grammar. But since the
empire of China and the kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad were founded, it
is without example for Turanians to distinguish themselves by constructive
social achievements of a pacific kind. The cleverness of the red race,
which survives in the Copts, is as pacific as the typical Tatar is the re-
verse; but this stock, which some scholars prefer to call proto-Semitic, has
the versatility without the tenacity of the true Semite, and by itself would
hardly supply the world with leaders. It only remains to suppose that the
contact or collision of these primitive nationalities — for 4000 B.C. they
must have met as nations — struck out flashes of inspiration which illumin-
ated all alike, so that the germs of domestic and social organization were
of the same type in all, as the simplest verbal roots may be shared among
widely divergent languages.

Each stock contributed something in which the others were wanting. It
is scarcely fanciful to say that the first yellow-skinned philosopher was a
Realist, while the first Nominalists were to be found in the primitive white
race, which, owing to its greater aptitude for the manipulation of symbols,
was able to develop alphabetic from syllabic writing, and substituted
coined money for weighed metal. In the red Hamitic stock we may re-
cognise the germ of qualities which subsequently produced that variety of
the human race characterized by a preference for trilateral roots, gender
suffixes, and a tendency to associate its best and worst propensities with its
theological beliefs and worship, — the people of Moses and Mohammed.
And in all three we find a genius for orderly family and communal life, a
taste for letters, and a well-developed moral code for domestic use.
Roughly speaking, perhaps it may be said that writing is of Turanian
origin and grammar of Semitic ; the proto-Turanian peoples have a genius
for literature and industry ; the proto-Semitic for language and trade. And
there is no difficulty in supposing a section of the proto-Turanian race to
have adopted proto-Semitic speech ; just as Arabic has been adopted in
historic times by non-Semitic peoples.

Leaving all open questions of affinity to be decided by the learning of
the future, we are certainly in a position to affirm that before the so-called
Aryans and Semites of history took the foremost place in the Old World,
probably before they were clearly differentiated, the first civilized States in
the world were founded by men of some other race — humane, industrious,
non-political, but with a moral philosophy for the use of princes ; liberal in
the treatment of women, with the most unchanging customs of any people
that ever lived, and with the most enduring records of their life. By an-
alogy we should expect all these States to belong to the same ethnological
family ; but if the identification cannot be maintained, the similarity of

P.C. D

34 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

temperament and institutions which suggested it only becomes the more
noteworthy ; as if the social order formulated by Chinese and Egyptian
rulers were not merely one natural view, but in fact the first or only one
that presents itself to a primitive community as either natural or possible.

BOOK I.

OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

"Some of these Gods, indeed, we have but lately learnt
to call by their usual Egyptian names ; but the power of
each one was known and honoured from the beginning."—
Plutarch.

" It is probable that while the influence of custom over
prices, wages and rent has been overrated, its influence
over the forms of production and the general economic
arrangements of society has been underrated. In the one
case its effects are obvious, but they are not cumulative ;
and in the other they are not obvious, but they are cumu-
lative. And it is an almost universal rule that when the
effects of a cause, though small at any one time, are con-
stantly working in the same direction, their influence is
much greater than at first sight appears possible." — Pro-
fessor Marshall.

CHAPTER I.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS.

§ i. THE PRE-HISTORIC KINGDOM AND THE NOMES.

IN giving precedence to the history of ownership in Egypt, it is not
intended to prejudge the question of the comparative antiquity of Egyptian
and Babylonian monuments or civilization. Both at the most moderate
calculation go back some 5,000 years from the present century ; but for
the first part of that time, say from 3,000 to 1,500 B.C., the materials for
inquiry are so much more abundant in Egypt, that on this ground only
it would be convenient to consider the records of that country first.

There can have been no considerable settled population in the valley of
the Nile before the advent of the Egyptians, since the inundation would
make the country uninhabitable for great part of the year, and unattractive
for the remainder, except to a race of civilized agriculturalists. The two
crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt were probably worn by independent
rulers before their union on the brow of Menes or some other precursor
of the kings of history. The phrase was in no way figurative, two distinct
diadems of different patterns being combined to make the "double
crown," worn by " the lord of the vulture and the uraeus." The two
countries had not only separate diadems and symbols of royalty, but also
different gods — Horus and Set — and different floral emblems, the lotus for
Lower, and the papyrus for Upper Egypt. And in whatever context
reference is made to the king's person, his double character is kept in
sight. In the time of Khufu, the king's mother is designated as one who
" sees the Horus and the Set," i.e. the god-king of Upper and Lower
Egypt ; and the chief of the thirty judges in the same way is described as
" having access to the king of Upper Egypt and drawing near to the king
of Lower Egypt." J

Absolutely nothing can be known as to the history of the two kingdoms
while separate, but it is probable that Upper Egypt was the first settled
and the most elaborately organized, while it was also, according to
Manetho, from Upper Egypt that the first king of the whole country was
taken. It is easier to fell trees than to drain marshes, so that the soil

1 It has been suggested that the title of " king of the upper and the lower regions "
does not mean king of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of earth and Hades, the king, like
the sun, being supposed to reign over both, but the conjecture is at present unsupported.
(Rev. Egyptologique, i. 1 6. )

38 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

of Upper Egypt was most easily made available for cultivation, and under
the ancient monarchy, while Southern Egypt was already a rich corn
country, the herds of great men were still driven into Lower Egypt to
pasture. Only one nome in the Delta is mentioned by name in the
monuments of the ancient empire ; l and if we are to conjecture, the
transfer of the capital to Memphis may have had the object, as it almost
certainly had the effect, of increasing the royal authority by withdrawing
its seat to a quarter of the kingdom where local government was less
developed and the centralization of its powers and resources therefore
more easily carried out.

One of the strongest features of the Hamitic race, wherever and when-
ever we meet with its branches, is its remarkable taste and talent for
organization. The Berber villages of the present day have an elaborate
government and codes of customary law as detailed as those of the
mediaeval Basques; and the earliest representatives of the race, who
succeeded in founding its most stable and powerful monarchy, are not
likely to have fallen short of their successors in the qualities which make
the village organization almost indestructible as well as all powerful within
its traditional sphere.

The division of Egypt into nomes evidently rests upon a base of ancient
fact, not on mere considerations of administrative convenience. The
character for the Egyptian word is an ideograph representing the " chan-
neled fields," an oblong plot, not a square (like
the Chinese tsing or " well," which stands for the

smallest unit of rural administration), but, like it, evidently

chosen at a time when every settlement was agricultural, and the existence

of irrigation canals the sure sign of civilized human occupation.2

Many of the provinces or nomes into which Egypt was finally divided
were probably governed originally by more or less independent princes
owning only a general fealty to the sovereign of their half of Egypt. But
prior to the consolidation of the nomes as centres of political government,
smaller administrative units in the form of townships had already
elaborated and given customary fixity to the type of government which the
kings and princes of history were expected and required to reproduce.
This local organization in Egypt bears the name nouit, a word belonging,
according to M. Maspero,3 au plus vieux fond de la langue, and, like the

nome, represented by an ideograph fl~^\ ,4 of unequivocal significance.

1 sEgypten und JEgyptisches Leben im Alterthum. By K. Erman, p. 122.

2 Cf. post, p. 76. A sail is the hieroglyph for wind, and those for other ideas implying
motion are derived from water-ways.

3 Un Manuel de Hierarchic Egypt ienne. Journal Asiatiqne, p. 310. 1888.

4 In Brugsch's hieroglyphic dictionary another form /<7^\ is met with, which is still
more significant : Brugsch reads the character nen \\> X))and connects it with an
Egyptian and Hebrew root with the sense sedit, habi- ^Q/ tavit ; sedes, domicilium ;
an inhabited place, country or town : nen-ti, inhabitant, and nen-t, region [of earth or
sky] have the same derivation, while the latter sense recalls the Babylonian idea of a
supreme ruler as one who is lord of the "four regions." So, on the king's accession,

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 39

The modern commune of Denderah consists of four groups of houses,
separated by clusters of palm trees and fields of durrah and beans, and the
significant part of the ancient character clearly represents the fence or
wall surrounding four such detached dwelling places or groups of houses.
In its earliest form the nou'it probably represented the smallest enclosure
inhabited by distinct family groups, or, in other words, the smallest
community held together and regulated by a civil or social pact instead of
by the automatic action of domestic relationships.

These communities again fall into groups, and it seems that the
Egyptians were for a long time content to apply the same name to
aggregations of different size and importance. Any group of hamlets or
dwellings rallied round a common centre, — market, fort, government
office, chapel or tomb,1 — might form a nouit, and a certain number of these
groups, united by a common worship, constituted a larger nouit , the city
or capital of the nome : thus Thebes is Nouit-Ammon, and the worship
of particular deities is the most distinguishing mark of many provinces.
The Greeks called the greater nouit TrdXts, and the lesser ones, which
answer to the Latin pagus and form the " country " as distinct from the
capital, KutfAtj. The ambiguity arising from the same word being used not
merely in different but contrasted senses caused the later Egyptians to
adopt two separate words for capital city and country town or commune,
which ended by supplanting nouit. The tomb of the prince of Beni
Hassan was a nouit and in the Under World the kingdom of every hour
bears the same name, which may be best rendered by the English town,
a word with an almost identical history, reaching from the primitive thorn
hedge enclosure of the rudest village to the " Town," which is in effect a
proper name for the national capital. Even the intermediate use of
nou'it has a counterpart in the phraseology of rustics, who speak of their
own village or village street as " the town." Nouit, however, means in
strictness only an Egyptian town ; the name is never applied to the
cities of foreigners, for which the more modern word timit is used, a fact
which helps to show that the ancient name implied not merely a settlement
of a certain size, which might exist anywhere, but also one governed and
administered in a particular way, only to be met with in Egypt.

The government of the early empire was decentralized ; local tribunals,
magazines, and militia existed,2 showing that the government of the
princes had included all these elements, but from the Third to the Fifth
Dynasty the power of the crown seems to have been in the ascendant.
The great nobles of the country were content to follow the king to the
capital and to hold office by his appointment, sometimes exercising by

four geese were let fly by the priests to carry word to the four regions of the heavens
that the new Horus had placed the red and the white crown upon his head. Erman,
loc a/., p. 1 02. Thothmes III. is styled " the great king who has taken possession of the
four regions of the world."

1 An early title is "governor of the town of the Pyramid." (Proceedings Soc. Bibl.
Archaol., 1887, p. 184.)

2 Erman, loc. cit., p. 128.

40 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

his favour a much wider command1 than belonged to any hereditary
jurisdiction, but apparently purchasing the chance by considerable
sacrifices of their independence. The burial places of the nornarchs at
different periods show by their situation whether the latter regarded them-
selves as royal officials or local chiefs. Throughout the Fourth and Fifth
Dynasties their tombs surround the monuments of the kings, but in the
Sixth Dynasty, and still more conspicuously under the Twelfth, they lie
among their own people in their own lands,3 as if the first splendour of
the Memphite monarchy had been followed by a revival or development
of a quasi-feudal state.

The course of events in China was exactly parallel to the half hypo-
thetical outline thus sketched for Egypt. The hereditary princes of the
south were the counterpart to the feudal princes of ancient China, and
like them supplied pretenders or local independent kinglets, whenever the
monarchy was weak. The correct style of address from the emperor to
the princes was " Uncle," while in Egypt under the first dynasties "royal
cousin " is the stock designation of those high in office or favour at court.
The local princes in each case were considered as kinsmen of the
sovereign, or rather, perhaps, the ruler was regarded as sharing their
descent from the principal families of the united race. In China the
different branches of the black-haired people were forced to cling together
by their position, surrounded in every direction by barbarous foreign
tribes ; and the nation fared best when the monarchy was strongest and
the king's kinsmen ready to serve as his ministers, instead of rivalling him
in the surrounding States ; but when the decline of the Chow Dynasty
began, towards the ninth century B.C., the States began to assert their
independence and periods of confusion followed, like those described by
Rameses II., when " every one was doing what he wished, and they had no
superior for many years who had priority over the others." 3 Probably
both in Egypt and China the kings succeeded local chiefs, exercising less
than royal powers ; but it is also probable in Egypt, and certain in China,
that a feudal period followed one of primitive monarchical centraliza-
tion.

The animosities and rivalries of adjoining nomes, which lasted to the
close of Egyptian history, are in a way an argument for the immemorial
antiquity of their separation. In one of. the monuments of the Twelfth
Dynasty the nomarch of Un is represented as receiving almost royal
honours, his statue being dragged along by "the clans of the east" and
"the clans of the west of Un." These clans, like those met with in rural
China, no doubt represented communities held together by a real genea-

1 Lepsius, DenkmaUr, ii. 99. A Kaqimna, possibly the same as the one in the
Prisse papyrus, is "overseer of the whole land of the North and South."

2 Erman, loc. cit., p. 133. Under Thothmes III., again, hereditary princes began to be
buried at Thebes, a sure sign of the growing ascendancy of the monarchy. (Mem.
de la Mission Archtologique Fran$aise au Caire, v. 362, 437.)

3 The passage following is rendered by Drs. Birch and Eisenlohr : The land of
Egypt was "under chiefs of nomes, each person killing the other for ambition and
jealousy." (Records of the Past, vol. viii. p. 46.)

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 41

logical tie ; but the very fact that they are mentioned in the plural shows
that their relation to the prince bore no resemblance to that of highland
clansmen to their chief. In the Middle Empire time was counted by the
nomarch's years, and sometimes more than half the inhabitants of a nome
bear names like his, but even this is not a token of clannishness, except in
the metaphorical sense. The Egyptians do not use surnames, but it was
the custom for royal officials to pay their court to Pharaoh by calling
their children after him, and even changing their own names in different
reigns ; and when the power of the local rulers was at its height, in this, as
in other respects, they followed the fashions of the royal court.

The tendency under the later monarchy was to substitute the appointed
nomarch for the hereditary prince, and this tendency was probably asso-
ciated with the growth of the cities and the increase in their comparative
importance. The ancient prince ruled over a state filled with thriving
townships ; the nomarch governed a province divided into town and
country districts, of which the former of course was the seat of administra-
tion, while the latter included all the lesser townships, together with the
cultivated fields, the marshes, which were used either for water-plants and
fowls, or pasture, and the branching canals with their banks. The prince
was ruler and lord over a number of village headmen who looked to him
for protection in return for tribute, and no change in the political status
of the superior chief affected the minor administrative details which alone
were of practical importance to the people. The number of local
governorships cannot have varied much after the country was once fully
settled, for if a break occurred in the succession when the local governor
had enjoyed the rank of an hereditary prince, the king did not, as in
modern feudalism, claim to annex the inheritance of the vassal for the
crown, but bestowed the dignity on some suitable officer of his own, who
might even hope to be succeeded by his son. It made little difference to
the dwellers in the nome whether the local government was carried on in
the name of an independent kinglet or hereditary prince, or by a lord
appointed to an hereditary governorship, in the name of the wearer of the
two crowns. The administrative machinery was the same in all cases.

From the village to the city, the province or the state, the same organiz-
ation prevailed : there is one person who "shows the way" to his neighbours,
fellow townsmen, fellow citizens, or fellow countrymen ; l him they look up
to and obey, and from this leader or chief, within the sphere of his author-
ity, they expect justice and protection in return for their obedience. The
combination, in Egypt, of the paternal or patriarchal spirit in the govern-
ment, with an elaborate and workmanlike administrative machinery, is most
easily explained on the supposition that the administrative details were
organized in the first instance by the people in their own way, if only on

1 Maspero, loc. dt., p. 321. The Hd na timitou ouhoui = " those who walk at the head
of "the cities and townships. This ha, the first — of village, town or province, may be
anything from a village headman to an hereditary prince. Erpa or ropa ha is the heredi-
tary prince of the first rank. Erpa by itself seems to have indicated family without office.
(De Rouge, Kechenhes sur les monuments des prem. 6 dynasties de F Egypte, p. 344.)

42 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

a small scale, and then taken over by the monarchy, which could only
improve on them by securing their perpetuity, that is, by keeping the
peace amongst rival princes and so preserving the self-government of their
respective cities.

It is scarcely possible to doubt the historical character of Menes, the
founder of Memphis, and supposed builder of the dyke which still protects
the province of Gizeh from inundation. It is true that we have no con-
temporary records concerning the eight kings of the First Dynasty, but the
chances are considerable against the preservation of the first monuments
erected, and there are some anonymous works which in point of style might
easily belong to the Second Dynasty, the fifth king of which is mentioned
in several subsequent monuments,1 referring to the worship still paid to
him. The continuation of such worship through later reigns or dynasties
is a sure test of the popularity or fame of Egyptian princes ; and this king
Sent was one of the names best known to ancient tradition, since he is
supposed to have revised a medical treatise, said to have been found in the
fifth reign of the First Dynasty. The meagre notices of all these reigns pre-
served by Manetho read like a transcript from some genuine but scanty early
chronicle, in which portents and prodigies receive a disproportionate place.
In style and matter they much resemble the so-called Bamboo Books of
China. The fourth king of the Third Dynasty is the hero of the Story of
the Peasant^ and the ninth or last but one is Senoferu, commemorated in
the Prisse papyrus, in the Wadi Maghara and on contemporary tombs.

With the Fourth Dynasty, really, contemporary monuments of all kinds
begin, so that the dim age of Egyptian antiquity includes only twenty-six
reigns extending perhaps over some four hundred years, a period quite
long enough for a civilized people to consolidate the government of a
civilized state. We know what four hundred years represent in the early
history of Greece, Rome or England, and it is a mistake to suppose that
the processes of growth must have been as slow in Egypt as those of
decay. On the contrary, the very simplicity of the political order, which
was one condition of its stability, negatives the idea of its being the result
of a long period of development.

The history of Egypt falls into three or four main periods ;2 the Ancient
Empire, including the reign of the first six dynasties, the Middle Empire,
represented mainly by the great Twelfth Dynasty, and the New or later
Empire, best represented by the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties,
though there is no broad line of demarcation between these and the Seven-
teenth and Twentieth Dynasties. After the Twentieth Dynasty, the period
of decadence, ending with the loss of Egyptian independence, sets in, but
from first to last there is very little change in the broad general features
of Egyptian life ; the constitution of the state, the social order, and the
customary working of the domestic relations, undergo little alteration

1 A. Wiedemann, Proc. Society of Biblical ArcJuzology, vol. ix. p. 180. The Ashmo-
lean Museum at Oxford has a funeral inscription of a relative of his.

2 Appendix A. Egyptian Chronology.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 43

through the three thousand years or more during which they can be
traced, so that there is little risk of error in using the documents of the
most distant periods to illustrate each other.

In all cases it is important to distinguish to which of the above four
main periods the authority for any statement belongs ; and if evidence for
any fact is to be met with in one of these periods only, the corresponding
statement cannot be safely generalized, as if all the "ancient Egyptians"
had lived at the same time. On the other hand, however, we should miss
the most instructive lessons of Egyptian history if, in our desire to dis-
tinguish between successive periods, we overlooked those characteristics
which are really common to the ancient Egyptians of all periods, and have
a special claim on our attention in virtue of that very fact. Indications as
to usage and feeling, which would be too slight to build on if they stood
alone, may become valuable when they appear as links in a series of con-
tinuous, involuntary revelations, and we run no risk, in bringing them
together, of exaggerating the stability of Egyptian modes of thought and
life.

§ 2. EGYPTIAN THEORY OF THE RULER'S DUTY.

As in China, the only duties described and inculcated at much length
in the classical texts are those of the rulers and governors of the
people. The religion of the country is not associated with the idea of
onerous obligations, and the domestic relations are considered and valued
as naturally pleasurable. There is thus a dearth of such clues as may be ob-
tained to the manners and customs of a people from the utterances of law-
givers and moralists seeking to correct or control them. We have instead
only the self-complacent descriptions of their own lives by persons well as-
sured that they have done all that which it was their duty to do, and not at
all disposed to regard themselves as unprofitable servants either of Pharaoh
or his people. We gather from these professions of conduct, and from the
corresponding negative confession in the Ritual, what ideal the governing
class set before itself; and we may be sure, from the comfortable absence
of self-criticism which characterizes their autobiographies, that no member
of the class had consciously acquiesced in any other standard as practically
preferable.

The Prisse papyrus, sometimes described as " the oldest book in the
world," contains two sets of sentences or maxims, both attributed to writers
of the Ancient Empire, and so archaic in style and matter that there is
nothing incredible in the antiquity claimed for them. The title of the
most important describes it as " an arrangement of good words ' l by Ptah-
hotep, a prince and nomarch who flourished in the reign of Assa, the last
king but one of the Fifth Dynasty. The sage, who represents himself

1 Perhaps the first metrical or rhythmic version of maxims already formulated. " The
Precepts of Ptah-hotep," by Philippe Virey. Records of the Past. New series, vol. iii.
1-35. And, by the same author, Etudes s^^r le Papyrus Prisse, le Livre de Kaqimna
et les Lemons de Ptah-hotep. Vieweg, Paris, 1887. Bibliotheque de I'Ecole des hautes
Etudes. Fasc. 70.)

44 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

dramatically as suffering from the infirmities of extreme old age, proceeds
to show how the aged man may nevertheless be of use by setting forth the
conclusions of his experience for the instruction of youth. His advice is
directed mainly to the governing or ministerial class and to them in their
relations to their superiors and their subordinates.

Superiors are to be treated with more deference than mere politeness
imposes upon all, but a wise officer will not be afraid of giving unpalatably
good advice to a master ; if it is resented, he will keep silence, but will not
be induced to say the thing which is not.

The wise man speaks, sees and hears or understands the Truth, — in the
very wide sense in which the Egyptians used the word, as representing
conformity, not merely conformity to fact, but to rule and nature, so that
the true is equivalent at once to the good or just, and to the real.
"Truth gives life," is a proper name, and to "make a thing true" is to
"make it good" as we should say, to restore or renew its reality.1 Vera-
city is thus synonymous with both wisdom and virtue, and the wise man's
" mind and tongue are together." 2 Justice is great, indispensable and un-
changeable, even from the days of Osiris. Those who are in authority must
seek the perfect way, and every one has learnt from his father that the
limits of justice are invariable.

It is contrary to justice for one to say, " I seize this for myself, of my
own will, by my power." The cultivator should be content to gather his
harvest in the field given him by great God, nor fill his mouth with that
which is his neighbour's. To do so is as bad as the tyrant who, like a
crocodile, takes by force, whose children are accursed, whose father is in
sorrow, and his mother the least blessed amongst women. The reverse
picture to such a crocodile is the head of a clan whom all the members of
it long to follow.3 Servants and dependents should be well treated, and
then, in case of need, they will not require urging, but will say to each other,
" Come on." Those who serve the great should be active, doing more than
what is ordered. Those who have to give orders should not do so arbi-
trarily, but only to guide or direct the work on hand. They are not to
spread terror among men : if any one seeks to live by so doing, "it is God
who will deprive his mouth of bread." Let men live in the bosom of
peace, and they will give voluntarily of their own accord. Those who ad-
minister the riches of the great are exhorted to consider their own and
their employer's interest as one, since in collecting for him the revenues
upon which he lives they are also collecting for themselves, who live on
what he has and gives.

The regard which is assumed to exist between the great lord and his
agent (as between the king and his chief officers) ought to be reproduced

.* P. Pierret, £tudes Egyptologiques, Livr. viii. p. 94. Mem. de la Miss., v. i. p. 101.

2 Cf. the Chinese maxim, according to which the superior man "acts before he speaks,
and afterwards speaks according to his action."

3 A governor of Thebes, at the beginning of the Twelfth Dynasty, boasts that " the
people of the Thebaid loved me, for I never showed them the countenance of a croco-
dile." (Maspero, Report of Int. Or. Congress of 1873, vol. ii. p. 48.)

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS, 45

between the agent and his subordinates. Nowhere except in Egypt is so
much stress laid upon the idea that authority is sustained by affection ;
docility or obedience are lovable, and that is the best of all good things.
The son who obeys his father shall grow old ; but obedience should be
willing, and then it is joyful. The son who obeys his father will be agree-
able to the great. The obedient son of a wise father instructs his children
in the same wisdom, and so the teaching of the wise endures ; no word
should be added and none taken away. The reward of the official who
follows all these counsels is, that his chief will call him " son " and the
bystanders will praise the mother who bore him. A good son (like a
virtuous servant) even goes beyond the instructions given him. If the
writer's son fulfils all these his father's words, he will enjoy health and the
king's favour, and live one hundred and ten years, the age which Ptah-
hotep professes to have reached himself, and which is the conventional
Egyptian phase for the ideal fulness of years.

These are not mere commonplaces of universal philanthropy. Con-
sidering the extreme brevity of the text, it is surprising at how many
different points it casts a light upon the real peculiarities of Egyptian
society.

In addition to the precepts already quoted, there is one, warning a I
minister not to alter the sense of the message entrusted to him, in order 7
to please the potentate addressed. Such a counsel would hardly have/
been needful in later ages, when diplomatic intercourse between the
Pharaohs and foreign princes was rare, and when, at all events, an
Egyptian ambassador would be under no temptation to please such a
foreigner rather than his own master. But if the constitution of ancient
Egypt resembled that of China, the warning becomes intelligible and
appropriate. Throughout .the three first Chinese dynasties the intercourse
between the emperor and the princes, between the sovereign of the
Middle Kingdom and the ruler of the surrounding states, was a matter of
the utmost importance, and the regulation of the ceremonies connected
with it received the most anxious attention of statesmen, who rightly saw
in it the palladium of the black-haired people's nationality. The
hereditary princes of ancient Egypt, no doubt, each had a court repro-
ducing in miniature that surrounding the wearer of the two diadems, and
unless the ministers of both king and princes could be depended on not
to sacrifice truth to courtesy, the interests of one or other must have been
endangered.

Deferential insincerity was recognised as the sin naturally besetting^
office-holders, but the temptation sprang less from fear than love, or at least \
from a sincere desire to please, and it shows how fastidiously high the ;
moral standard of the Egyptians was, that they insisted equally and
simultaneously on the duties of courtesy and truthfulness.

The book of Kaqimna and the Lessons of Ptah-hotep bear a closer
resemblance to the Chinese classics than to any other writings on this
very account. They treat manners as a part of morals and they insist

46 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

upon self-control and consideration for others as the essential foundation
of good manners. Moderation and courtesy in discussion are prescribed ;
and even if the other side is violent or in error, the son of the sage must
continue calm and respectful. Patience, tolerance, and politeness are
enjoined in a man's dealings with his neighbours ; calm and composed
speech befit those who have to give orders, and he who would do justice
must have patience to listen to the whole story of his petitioners. The
moderation to be observed in speech, should, if necessary, be lent to
others, and the son of the sage will not repeat that which never ought to
have been said. A small man who becomes great should give courteous
precedence to his former equals. It is contrary to the rules of politeness
to interrupt or dispute, and, according to them to show a bright face. No
man ever left his coffin after being laid to rest there, and meanwhile it is
ungracious to scowl upon life " like some one who comes out of the store-
room looking as if he hadn't had enough to eat." 1

/ Kaqimna,2 a contemporary of Senoferu, condescends to still minuter
( details : when eating in company, a well-bred person will disguise his own
/ tastes, in order to leave what is best for other people, but if his corn-
's panions are of the rough, jovial sort, who eat and drink to excess (literally
"till their girdle bursts ") he will keep them company, and do violence to
his own inclinations rather than refuse the morsels offered him. "A
discourteous man is a grief to his mother and his kindred.'' 3

Whether these treatises were really written by the eminent persons to
whom they are ascribed is not of very great importance. Many of the
maxims reappear, but slightly modified, in the words of a Ramessid scribe
(and indeed in the Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach) ; and even if our
edition of Ptah-hotep had been prepared some time between the Sixth
and the Twelfth Dynasties, the sentiments of the ancient monarchy would
be as well remembered and as faithfully reproduced then as those of the
Prisse papyrus are by Scribe Ani, and his again in the demotic maxims
translated by M. Revillout. The relation between the hereditary ruler
and his chosen minister is represented in the same light by Ptah-hotep
and the private monuments of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynasties?
and even under the Persians and the Greeks, the tradition of it had not
become entirely extinct.

Ptah-hotep calls himself a king's son, but as he himself explains that the
title "son " may be a complimentary reward for good service, we are not
obliged to take the statement literally ; anyway he concerns himself more
with the duties of ministers than of princes, of officials rather than of those

1 Or as if his share of "the loaves of communion " had been unsatisfactory ; (?) a trace
of common cultivation like the Chinese.

2 The monuments mention an " overseer of the whole land of the North and South,"
bearing this name, at about the same period ; the office was one of great importance ;
indeed Una, when filling it, boasts of the honours conferred on him as unexampled
in history, but this is only a formula.

3 The special mention of the mother as dishonoured by a tyrannical or unmannerly
son is important in connection with other peculiarities of the relationship referred to
subsequently.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 47

whom they serve. He seems to regard differences of rank as in a way
accidental, but to be recognised without discontent as an accomplished y
fact. The accident of birth is not final, and small men may rise to high/
office. It is assumed that they rise through their merits, and this accounts^
for the quasi-Chinese tone used in speaking of the class which serves or
administers as if it were in some way the highest.

The " son of the sage " answers to the " superior man " of Confucian
moralities ; and while it was hardly expected, at least in Egypt, that the
king should be a sage himself, he was seriously required, as in China, to
choose superior men to administer the government, and to regulate his own
conduct in accordance with their sense of propriety. Diodorus was
informed that the ancient kings of Egypt did not live after the manner of
other monarchs,1 doing as they pleased, but in everything conformed to
the laws of the country, not merely in what concerned the public adminis-
tration of government, but in their private affairs and conversation. All
real power was in the hands of the learned class, the repository of all
sacred and secular knowledge.

According to Diodorus, the high priests, in praying for the king, used •,
to expatiate on the virtues which he ought to display and denounce any(
offences he might commit, laying the blame of them, in true consti-)
tutional style, upon his bad advisers. Sacred records, past laws ano/
history, were read out for his edification, but in spite of all these traditional
restraints it would have been the height of impoliteness, not to say
blasphemy, to suggest a doubt as to the real omnipotence of Pharaoh, and
there could therefore be no sense of restraint in the conformity which a
good king would show in observing the immemorial rules of truth and
justice. On the other hand, frivolous or wilful monarchs would find their
hands tied and their movements trammelled by the iron fetters of court
etiquette, which in the name of their own exalted dignity cut them off
from all opportunities of licentious indulgence.

There is a fragmentary record of the reign of Amasis,2 telling how the /
king scandalized his officers by desiring to go upon the water and drink \
beer. Like Chinese ministers in a similar case, they are torn in two
between their boundless respect for the person of the king, which makes
it impossible to tell him in so many words that he musvt forbear, and their
boundless respect for the dignity of the kingly office, which is disgraced by
such impropriety. Unfortunately the end of the story is wanting, but it
evidently concluded with a rebuke administered in the form of an anecdote,
with a delicate indirectness requiring the highest diplomatic skill, — a skill
without which the role of a high-minded courtier must have become
impossible both in Egypt and China.

It is in the earliest monuments that most stress is laid upon the
affection subsisting between the king and his servants. In the auto-
biographical inscriptions of the first dynasties the highest officials boast,
with an evident air of sincerity, not only of the rewards bestowed on them

1 Diod. Sic., I. vi. 2 Cours de droit Egyptien, p. 18. By Eugene Revillout.

48 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

by their royal masters, but of his personal delight in their services and the

tenderness of his regard for them.1 In connection with this trait, it is

significant to find amongst the evils imprecated upon sacrilegious persons,

I* " The great shall not enter their house so long as they live on earth. They

7 shall not enter nor be brought into the house of Pharaoh. They shall not

hear the words of the king in the hour of his cheerfulness."

The reward, on the other hand, of those who respect the funeral rites of
the dead, is, that they shall share the royal feasts when they rest in the
Amenti after the ideally long life of one hundred and ten years. To en-
tertain superiors, and to share their social relaxations, was evidently
regarded in Egypt as a real pleasure and privilege, instead of a dangerous
honour, as in later Oriental despotisms; and in the Praise of Learning, a
list of the social and material disadvantages under which the ancient fellah
suffered, includes, as apparently the most painful badge of inferiority, that
" the hall of every house," the scene of social festivities, is shut against
him.

§ 3. HEREDITARY AND APPOINTED OFFICERS.

The often quoted statement of Diodorus that " all the Egyptians are
? equally noble," would have applied equally to every period of the mon-
/ archy, for at the earliest time of which we have any knowledge there was
no marked distinction between the hereditary possessor of wealth and office,
and a man of obscure birth, who had received both from the king as a re-
ward of personal merit. Egypt and China are not peculiar in this respect.
In all Oriental countries there is something of the same general diffusion
of good manners, and the same half servile, half democratic feeling that,
before God and the king, one man is much the same as another, so that a
man of the lowest birth may come to stand next in authority to the throne.
What was peculiar to the two long-lived civilizations is the restriction of
power to the learned class, so that an hereditary prince, without personal
qualifications, could not serve the king in office, while a scribe of humble
birth, who distinguished himself in discharge of the king's commissions,
might be rewarded by the grant of hereditary office as well as private
estates.

The independent local aristocracy consisted of the " royal cousins," de-
scended from princes whose ancestors may have been the equals of those of
Menes, and who were still counted as the king's relations, though they
had no power outside their own estates unless by his appointment. On
the other hand, the highest honour which could be bestowed upon an
officer of lower birth, was to turn him into a relation by giving him in
marriage a woman from the house of Pharaoh, just as the Incas used to
reward their nobles with the hand of a virgin from the house of the sun.
The road to power, or rather to office, was by royal favour, and this was to
be won, as we gather from one autobiographical epitaph after another, by
administrative skill and energy, by success in the conduct of warlike ex-

1 For phrases describing the valued intimacy with the king, see Erman, I.e., p. 108.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 49

peditions, or the transport of valuable stones for monuments, and, what is
presupposed in both of these, the exercise of an upright and humane control
over all branches of the civil service of the country.

A granddaughter of Menkara (Mycerinus) was given in marriage to an
officer of this sort, who is described as superintendent of mines, governor
of temple domains, master of the stores for the royal household, and, as a
crowning privilege, dispensed from the ceremony of prostration, and allowed
to kiss the king's knee.

The career of Amten, an officer of Senoferu, who filled a number of
offices, of gradually increasing importance, can be traced at length.1 His
father was a chief scribe, and his mother was not a lady of property; it is
mentioned (as something exceptional?) that she could not supply him "with
loaves kneaded in her own house/' so that his father provided for his main-
tenance. Perhaps she was not an " established wife," and subsequently,
when Amten received two hundred plots of land and an allowance of bread
from the king, he assigned a quarter of the lands as a provision for his
mother. He had the right of bearing "the staff of commandment" given
him, which is an additional reason for supposing him not to have been
" born " or " descended," as this emblem of authority is generally wielded as
of course by the lord of a tomb. As " scribe of the place of provisions," he
probably had the duty of receiving the king's dues in kind, while another
office connected with the same " place " may have involved the issuing of
wages, also in kind, to the servants or employees of the realm, just as, in
ancient China, the royal revenues were received, and the salaries of officials
paid, in grain. The significance of another title (haqou ahouit\ associated f
with the governorship of a castle in the Saite nome, will be more con-
veniently discussed hereafter.

The inscription of Una, who flourished during the first four reigns of the
Sixth Dynasty, is a typical specimen of its kind.2 It describes how he
began his career under king Teta, whose treasury he superintended, and
whose irrigated lands he inspected : in the next reign he was " dearer to j
the heart of the king than all the dear nobles, and all the other servants )
of the land." He was employed to bring a monolith for the sarcophagus)
of the king, and stones for his pyramid, thereby causing " the most perfect
pleasure to the heart of his Majesty." Una was as successful in war as in
peace, and led five successful expeditions against "the land of the Hirusha."
Negro troops were included in his army, and the scene of his victories was
probably in Palestine, as he speaks of cutting down vines and fig trees.

Even after death it has been his fortune to render to his master such
services as lie nearest to the heart of an Egyptian, for it is owing to his
description of the material used for King Pepi's sarcophagus (white lime-
stone) that the impostor, with a basalt coffin, who had usurped the funeral
chamber in the king's pyramid, was detected and balked of his chance of

1 La carriere administrative de deux hauts fonctionnaires ^.gyptiens vers la fin de la
troisieme dynastie. G. Maspero. /ourn. As., April, 1890.

2 Translated (inter alia] by M. Maspero. Records of the Past, N.S., ii. I-IO.

P.C. E

5o OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

a fraudulent immortality. In the next reign Una's favour continued un-
diminished, indeed he was made governor of the whole of Upper Egypt, a
•thing the " like of which had never been done before." He was again em-
ployed in fetching granite for the pyramid of king Mer-en-ra, and in cutting
down forests in the south to form rafts and boats for its conveyance down
ithe river.

No other private inscription belonging to the Ancient Empire gives
•similarly detailed historical information, but a number of tombs belonging
to the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, show the titles and offices held by the
•departed, and gives indications of their character, which seem the more
•reliable, since the phases are not, as a matter of course, the same in all.
Minor personages, servants and attendants are often represented and men-
tioned by name in the earliest tombs, and in them also we find frequently
instead of, or in addition to, the wife and children, the figure of a so-called
•"friend," or " brother of eternity." Such a friend and a dog accompany
Khafra-ankh, a priest of the Pyramid of Khufu, while his son is represented
as presiding over scribes and servants ; elsewhere he is seated side by side
with his wife, resting his hand on her shoulder, and the pictures seem to
have been added by degrees, for the number of his children rises finally to
six, three sons and three daughters, with perhaps one child of the next
generation.1 The title of the king's friend or intimate,2 which ultimately
became, as it were, official, is bestowed on several of the deceased.

One tomb of the same (fourth) dynasty, commemorates an officer of
Khufu, " who loves his master," and his wife, " who loves him." 3 In an-
other the usual representation of scenes of harvest, fishing, etc., bears the
legend, " Aspect of the things around me in the region where I said the
truth, where I did the truth," 4 the speaker in his tomb assures those who
come after him, that if they will do likewise, they also, like him, will have
wealth to leave to their descendants. He loved his father and mother,
was gentle with his companions, and affectionate to his servants ; he made
no quarrels, and ill-used no one. In the same tone, one Samnefer, the
father of several sons, all holding some kind of office, declares : " I have
spoken the truth, I have loved God ; at court I spoke good (of others),
I have never said anything bad against any one to the Divine Majesty of
the King." 5

Another grave of the Fifth Dynasty belonging to a priest of Menkara,
enriched with two sturdy archaic portrait statues of the deceased, represents
him sailing to the Amenti, accompanied by his son, the doctor and scribe
Ptah-hotep, his wife, priestess of the crown of Neit, two other sons, scribes,
and a comrade of eternity. The tomb was intended to contain another
statue, and the legend says : " May justice be with every man who arrives

1 Lepsius, Denkmdler, ii. 8-10. Description by P. Pierret.
8 The term is rendered " living in the heart of."

3 This is the usual rendering, but M. Renouf argues that it should be taken " whom he
loves." The possibility of such a difference of opinion illustrates the uncertainty of many
difficult texts.

4 Denkmaler, ii. 43. B /£., ii. 79-81.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 51

by this statue, his image, in the place where is one equitable in words, )
who never did evil, but did that which every man ought to do." l Else-/
where we find what this is, compendiously described as "to worship God,S
love men, and honour the dead ; to feed the hungry and thirsty, to clothe'
the naked, and to lead the wanderers on the right way."

The general intention of the epitaphs is clearly only to state, on behalf T
of the deceased, that he was a virtuous citizen, but they continue to do so /
in substantially the same terms in the later as in the earlier monuments.
" I gave bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked.
I gave food to the sacred beasts, and bestowed oil and garments for them. I
I entertained hospitably master and servant on their journey. The gates '
were open to the stranger coming from without ; I gave him everything
to sustain his life. God turned His countenance towards me and re-
warded me for what I had done. He gave me to live joyfully to a great
age on earth, and numerous children sat at my feet, my son with his son
beside him on the day when I departed from life." 2

A twelfth dynasty inscription 3 lays more stress on less material good
deeds, and describes its subject as " speaking fair, reciprocating love, void
of speaking evil, doing the behests of the God of his township, the be-
loved of his nome." All other boasts might be unfounded, but it is
scarcely possible for a magnate who is hated for his own or his servants'
tyranny to delude himself that he is loved ; and at the same time, if
members of a ruling class consider their felicity or their reputation im-
perfect unless they are genuinely popular with their dependants, it is
obvious that conduct irreconcilable with such popularity cannot be openly
and systematically pursued.

The beloved governor was a real personage, not a fancy portrait de-
signed by the undertaker's stone-mason. Perhaps the strongest proof of
this is given by a hymn to the great God Amon, of whom nothing better
can be said than that he is as good to the miserable as " a good governor." 4
The king is the bestower of protection, of security, of life, health and the
heart's joy, as well as the lord of justice and the lord of eternity. Indeed,
in the ordinary phraseology of religious texts, while Amon and the other
divine personages are distinguished as " the great Gods," the king is known
as " the good god." 5

It seems thus that the most ancient religions begin by recognising the
power of the unseen or uncontrollable influences which affect humanity,
and the goodness of visible human agents, whose power is exercised for the
benefit of the masses subjected to their action. Human goodness is by-
and-by attributed to the great Gods, when the community has become
attached to its mode of life, and has discerned that its peaceful con-
tinuance is partly dependent on the co-operation of the uncontrollable

1 /£., ii. 46. 2 ^gyptische Graberwelt, p. 32. Brugsch Bey.

3 Proceedings Soc. Bibl. Arch., Nov., 1887, p. 23.

4 Chabas, Melanges £gyptologiques, 3rd Ser., p. 6l.

5 Erman, loc. cit., i. p. 91.

52 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

powers, which are accordingly judged to be friendly. But the language in
which the Gods are spoken of is so easily borrowed, that we can seldom be
as sure as in Egypt that religious texts reflect the historical order of ideas,
according to which human goodness was first observed, admired and
named ; and then, because of its admirableness, ascribed to the Gods, —
not first believed in as a divine attribute and commended for human
imitation.

The Egyptian priesthood was a much larger and more varied body than
is generally designated by such a name. It included the whole circle of
the educated, and in the palmy days of Egyptian independence there was
little except the rudiments of education in common between the lower class
of priests, who attended to the routine of the temple services, and the
learned class, who were eligible for the highest judicial or administrative
offices. A sort of middle class was formed by the scribes, whose business
it was to transmit the orders of the ruling few to the obedient many ; but
the position of these intermediaries was variable, touching at one ex-
tremity almost the highest and at the other the lowest ranks in the com-
munity. The whole body of officials in the service of the king, the whole
body of priests, and the scribes in the employ of private persons, all belonged
to the literary class, and any member of this class was eligible for the
highest posts. In Egypt, therefore, as in China, high office was theoreti-
cally open to every one who had received a literary education, and the
several claims of birth and merit were allowed to subsist side by side.

The orthodox Chinese theory allows rank and wealth to be inherited,
but not office ; and in spite of the strong family feeling of the Egyptians,
the transmission of power from father to son was made in practice to
depend upon the son's fitness for its exercise.

We learn this from Scribe Ani, whose terse maxims state both sides of
the question with equal force. " The old bull is faithful to the soil he
has been taught to till and remains what the herdsman has made him ;
the lion, though fierce, becomes more obedient than the ass ; the horse is
harnessed and takes to the road obediently ; the dog, oh, he understands
what is said, he follows his master. The camel l bears burdens, did not its
mother before it ? the negro is taught to speak the language of Egypt,
Syria and all foreign countries. So," says the old scribe to his son, " Be
obedient, and that which I have told thee of my doing in the discharge of
all my functions, thou also wilt know how to do the same." *

The parental tutor hopes to make skill hereditary by education, but, on
the other hand, when he is not thinking of his own son, the voice of
general experience speaks : " The Controller of the Treasure has no son,
the aged chancellor no heir ; the hand, the skill of the scribe are his own ;
he does not give that to his children. The great, the miserable, make
themselves."

Such maxims, handed down from age to age, no doubt made it easy

1 The translation of this word has been questioned, but if not camel what can it mean ?

2 Chabas, V Egyptologie, 1874-7. Maximes du Scribe Ani, 62.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 53

for the rulers to abide in the moderate middle course which seems to have
suited the national genius, giving, as a rule, a first chance to the sons of
fortune and all the rest to merit, irrespective of rank. During periods of
disturbance the numbers of the literary class fell, which is an argument
that its administration was on the whole disinterested. A son of the high
priest of Sais, who had been dispossessed of his functions by Amasis and
was restored to the chief priesthood by Cambyses, claimed to be rendering
a service to the state in having promising children trained at the public
cost to the scribe's profession, " knowing that this was the best means of
restoring what had fallen into ruin, of rendering firm the names of the
Gods, their temples, their revenues, and the celebration of their festivals
for evermore." l A corrupt bureaucracy would have taken advantage of
the Persian conquest to enrich and aggrandize itself and its descendants,
whereas even the less patriotic of the Egyptians aimed rather at saving the
constitution, as we might phrase it, by keeping up the old native form of
administration under foreign conquerors, a course pursued successfully by
Chinese statesmen more than once under analogous conditions.

The reason that Egyptian scribes never claimed or received the same
distinction as the whole class of Chinese literati, is because only one of
the three channels open to them led to the great prizes : a berth in the
hereditary priesthood, or in the employment of private patrons was a com-
fortable provision, but no particular honour attached to it. The great
officers of the king, on the other hand, might owe preferment to their
hereditary rank as well as to their literary education, to birth as well as to
merit, and thus there was not the same sentiment in favour of literary merit
as the only path to rank and power. If the literary class in China were
expected to furnish the empire, let us say, with Taoist priests and com-
mercial clerks as well as with officials, the parallel with Egypt would be
closer, and the status of the learned certainly lower than at present.

In Egypt there was not the same separation as in China between popular
religion and orthodox philosophy, and so it was possible for a scholar to
be a priest or a priest a learned man, though the rank and file of the
priesthood did not occupy so high a position in the social order as has
been imagined. The national system of education was in the hands of
learned priests, while the ordinary service of the temples was left to priests
who were not learned ; and the highest secular officials were so far in re-
lation with the hierarchy as to have received their training at its hands.

Under the early monarchy the chief officials were sent " to perform
commissions " of all sorts indiscriminately. A great architect was certain
to stand so high in the royal favour as to be entrusted with other offices
of state, while a successful general or administrator was sure to be honoured
with a general supervision of " the works of the palace of the king," or
whatever architectural enterprise was in favour at the time. The office of
architect, however, was hereditary, like that of priest, and the lapse of time
no doubt tended to render the division of labour between, for example
1 Revue £gyptologique> vol. i. p. 71.

54 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

building priests and fighting architects more clearly marked than it seems
to have been under the first Dynasties.

Among the principal scribes mentioned in Egyptian texts are the royal
scribe or the scribe of Pharaoh, the scribe of the table of offerings of the
lord of two worlds, the scribe of the treasures, also scribes of the store-
houses, the scribe of recruiting (?), the scribe of the tribunal of justice,
the scribe of the artizans, the scribe of the temple, the scribe of the
troops, the scribe accountant of everything, the chief of the scribes of the
table of all the gods.1 Every department, as one might say, of Church
and State was administered by a chief and an inferior scribe.

The work of the inferior grades was such as might be done by mere
students, and in Egypt, as in ancient China before the system of examina-
tion was fully developed, it seems to have been usual for young scribes to
pursue their literary studies while serving their apprenticeship to practical
office work. This is proved by the scribbled memoranda on the back of
many of our copies of The Praises of Learning, and other themes, which
sometimes supply very valuable hints as to the prices of commodities and
the nature of the transactions which the scribes were privileged to conduct.
They were of course the only arithmeticians in the community, and not
particularly skilful ones, having more in common in this respect with the
Chinese than the Babylonians. The class of problems, however, with
which they had to deal did not vary much, and so, in spite of the cumbrous
processes in use, the solutions were arrived at somehow; and the laity were,
perhaps, all the more impressed because of the apparent abstruseness of the
calculations, required to show, for instance, the amount of corn contained
in a granary of given dimensions or the size of a field of specified length
and breadth. One of the sums is more interesting, the object being appar-
ently to ascertain the relative value in corn of a stated quantity of beer
and bread ; wages are to be paid in these commodities, and it seems that
their value to the recipient is measured by the quantity of grain employed
in their manufacture.2

At the opposite pole from these humble clerks there was a class of
learned priests, the reXiu, called by the Greeks who resorted to them for
instruction pterophores, who composed or commented on the few religious or
philosophic texts which had really classical authority, and in the decline of
the empire, were probably all that remained to represent the natural aris-
tocracy of humanely wise statesmen, which gave its character to the
ancient government. This class was the depository of the traditional
" wisdom of the Egyptians," and furnished the closest parallel in position
and influence to the scholars and literati of China.

The ancient dress of the priesthood consisted of a loin cloth, and a
panther's skin thrown over the shoulders, a costume which, like the use of
sacrificial knives of stone, shows from what rudimentary elements civiliza-
tion was evolved in Egypt. The priests were primarily pourers of libations,
but, as their name neb indicates, this rite was associated with ideas of
1 Transactions S.B.A., voL vii. pt. 3, p. 426, 7. 2 Erman, JEg. u. &g. Leben, p. 479.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 55

purification rather than sacrifice. Herodotus says that the priests of his
day " observe, so to speak, thousands of ceremonies," and he describes
more or less accurately their ideas on the subject of natural and ceremonial
impurity, and their dislike of foreigners manifested in the assumption of
their uncleanness. But ceremoniousness of the courteous sort was not
restricted to the priests, though, as we have seen, the rules of propriety
received much attention from the most ancient men of letters.

Our information with regard to the educational institutions of Egypt is
scanty ; an "inspector of writings" is mentioned in a Fifth Dynasty tomb ; 1
an officer of the Sixth Dynasty is described as " steward of the house of
books," 2 and similar allusions to royal libraries are met with at recurring
intervals. There was a special academy for the instruction of military
officers, and the cost of the curriculum to the parents was not less than
the value of three slaves.3 The contract of marriage in the Tale of Setna
is written by "the scribe of the house of instruction." Under the
Ptolemies every town had a house for a school under the mastership of
this personage, and the institution is doubtless nearly as old as the
monarchy. Ani counts among the many claims of a mother on her son's
gratitude, that as soon as he has left the nursery, and begun to go to
school— evidently to the day-school of the township— she brings him food
and drink every day from home.

A training school for sacred scribes, disturbed by Cambyses, was restored
by Darius, and there can be little doubt that the machinery of public in-
struction received as much attention in ancient Egypt as in the China of the
Chows. Colleges and schools for higher instruction were associated with
the temples, where music was also taught, and the The Praises of Learning
so often referred to, are evidently composed for the benefit of the classes
held in these establishments. The allusions to examinations and the
reiterated assurances that preferment is the reward of learning make it
probable that the officials were chosen from among the more advanced
scholars, though there was nothing answering to the elaborate literary
competitions of China.

The quasi-constitutional appearance which even foreign conquerors
like the Ptolemies succeeded in giving to their government can be best
explained if we suppose them only to have taken advantage of the cus-
tomary annual assembly or conclave of the chiefs of the hierarchy to
submit to them the decrees which the king wished to have circulated, and
to induce them to throw into customary and acceptable shape as much of
them as they were willing to endorse. Merely as interpreters their services
must have been almost indispensable, and when the rule of the foreigners
was an accomplished fact, the most patriotic natives might easily believe
themselves to be doing their country service in Egyptianizing the adminis-
tration which they could not overthrow.

1 Denkmdler, ii. 60.

a Maspero, Hist, ancienne des peuples de F orient, 4th ed. p. 271.

3 Ib. , p. 266. Babylonian and Oriental Record, ii. p. 126.

56 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

§ 4. ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE.

We cannot trace in detail the steps by which judicial functions gradually
came to be monopolized by the priesthood, but it is probable that in the
first instance the administration of justice and the care of the temple
estates were handed over to the same persons ; namely, those forming the
intellectual aristocracy of the country. The object was not to secure
priestly judges or judicial priests ; but the men esteemed for learning and
ability were invited to fill the highest and most responsible offices of all
kinds, and as the ceremonial duties of the chief priests were not onerous,
the same class and the same individuals were called on to act in the double
capacity.

The description given by Diodorus of the constitution of the Egyptian
high court of justice is borne out in several respects by the evidence of
monuments going back to the first ages of the monarchy.1 According to
him, the judges, taken respectively from Thebes, Memphis, and Heliopolis,
formed a college of thirty, which elected its own chief, the city whence he
came having the privilege of electing a second representative in his place.
Important causes and appeals were brought before this supreme tribunal,
which was maintained at the king's expense, and decided all cases with
the utmost pains and impartiality in accordance with the laws, "written in
eight books," which were brought before them as they sat.

Inscriptions of the ancient empire frequently describe their subjects as
belonging to one of the "royal tens," and other phrases show that there
were three of these. Ra-hotep is described as chief or mouthpiece of the
thirty.2 Another judge at Thebes is called "the only great one in the
seat of the ten," the right (or middle, centre) man of the court of justice of
the thirty, who administers the laws of his Honis, the king ; and we are
further told that "the desire of many was accomplished by his sayings."
The gods Chnum and Anubis are called first or chief of the thirty ; it was
the privilege of the chief of the thirty to draw near to the person of the
wearer of both crowns. The thirty Suteni are mentioned in documents of
the Twelfth Dynasty, and allusions to the same body occur in incidental
phrases, such as: "Among the thirty judges "; "I give thee acquittal
before the thirty " ; and the like.3 Mentuhotep, who flourished under
Usurtasen L, was an " auditor in the court of the thirty " ; he knew what
was hidden in everybody ; he listened well and spoke wisely ; " rival
brothers came forth content with what proceeded from his mouth."4
Whether this tribunal of thirty judges was always composed in the same
manner, is another question, which we may hesitate to answer in the
affirmative. The number thirty meets us in another context : there are
thirty great ones of the south, who do not appear to have been exclusively
judges; they acted as chief of the water-ways in their districts, and as

1 Revtte Egyptologique, iii. p. 9 ff.

2 Erman, loc. cit., i. 123.
8 Erman, ib. 123, 4.

4 Ib., 131 ; Transactions S.B.A., vii. pt. iii. p. 355.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 57

governor of its chief town, if it had one ; and though they exercised judicial
functions as well, it was probably rather as president of an inferior court
than as equal members of the central tribunal. There cannot have been
as many as thirty nomes in Upper Egypt, and some of the thirty officers
must therefore have held governorships of inferior importance.1

The ingenuity of the political races, which invented representative
government, has rather defeated the purpose of its own invention, since it
has suggested the possibility of acquiring a popular reputation, not as an
end in itself, or an incidental result of the pursuit of higher ends, but as a
means towards the attainment of political power. This development was
unknown in primitive states, and hence common fame and local repute
had an unequivocal value, and a man who received the suffrages of his
fellow-citizens, however they may have been expressed, was proved by that
fact alone to possess the qualities of a ruler and a judge. The three
"royal tens" consisted perhaps in theory of such local notables and sages,
invited by the king and maintained at his cost to administer justice to all
his subjects. Ultimately, no doubt, this patriarchal tribunal became pro-
fessionalized and burdened with a tribe of venal clerks, scribes and door-
keepers, whose exactions under the later monarchy prompt a suitor's hymn
to Amon : " O Amon, lend thine ear to him that is alone before the tri-
bunal. He is poor, not rich. The court oppresses him ; silver and gold
for the clerks of the book, garments for the servants." 2 Another hymn
invokes Amon Ra, the first of the gods, as the protector of the wretched,
who is not deceived by the presents of the guilty, and does not " consider
promises " 3 in giving judgment.

But, notwithstanding the existence of venal officials, justice was still be-
lieved to be in reach of the poorest Egyptian, if he had courage to seek it,
not merely from the gods, but from those standing nearest to them on
earth. The guilty might have protectors at court, even within the royal
household, and woe to the petitioner whose memorial fell into the hands
of such an one ; but let it reach the king or the judges of the great tribunal,
and just and generous judgment might be looked for. Scribes and even
governors were open to bribes, and might give impunity to offenders who
should have been punished as a mere matter of police ; but, on the other
hand, an appeal could lie against even high officers for wrong done by
themselves in their administrative capacity, and the memorial, laid before
the supreme court, might include charges of bribery against officials before
whom the, case had been already tried. Probably the whole working of

1 M. Maspero rejects the evidence of Diodorus respecting the thirty judges (or mabiou}
as late and second-hand, but believes in their judicial functions, amongst other good
reasons, because the Action between the Belly and the Head is said to be tried before the
mabiou (see his Etudes Egyptiennes, i. 260). He conjectures that the r\^r\ which occurs
in the word may have only a syllabic value, and denote the syllable mab, not the number
30 (Journ. Asiatique, 1890, p. 358). But if the sign for 30 has this syllabic value, how
and why did it acquire it ? Surely only because of its occurrence in a word of great
antiquity and importance.

2 Records, vi. 97.

3 Chabas, Melanges Egyptologiques, iii. p. 145.

58 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

the system resembled that of China, where there is a complete confusion
between the domains of civil and criminal law, and where the minor
tribunals are so corrupt that decent people are loth to resort to them and
endeavour to arrange all disputes en famille^ but where appeals are referred,
in the last resort, to the emperor himself, and the rendering of careful,
even-handed justice has always been common enough to compel the
admiration of foreigners, in just the same way, at dates that are centuries
apart.

The oldest realistic novelette in the world * tells how a peasant, op-
pressed by the son of one Asari, a dependant of the chief steward of the
king, appeals first to this officer, whom he addresses as " the orphan's
father, the widow's husband, brother of the lonely woman, the clother of
the motherless." A council of nobles, the High Steward himself, and the
king all in turn appear willing to do justice to the peasant, but the two
latter find his eloquence so fascinating, that they keep him waiting for
judgment till he has been obliged to uplift his voice in protest and petition
no less than nine times. "The majesty of King Neb-ka-n-ra, of blessed
memory/' who was answerable for these delays, gave orders that both the
peasant and his wife should receive rations of bread or corn and beer
during the course of the trial ; after the third petition, the stream of elo-
quence was stimulated, in very unpardonable fashion, by a beating.
Finally, each petition is written at length on a clean roll of papyrus, " and
the High Steward Meruitensa sent it to the majesty of King Neb-ka-n-ra,
of blessed memory, and it was good within (him) more than anything that
is in this whole land." The king then tells his steward to do justice, and,
though the end of the text is wanting, there seems every reason to believe
that the complainant was compensated for all his troubles, and rewarded
for his command of language by a grant of all the property of his oppres-
sor. One phrase in his first appeal is worth noting : the steward is
invited to do justice and abolish oppression, like " a praiseworthy man
praised by the praiseworthy."

That appeals were made to the king himself, in fact as well as fiction,
even with regard to comparatively trivial grievances, is proved by surviving
monuments. An engraved stone bears a petition from a workman, named
Kenna, to one of the kings Amenhotep, of the Eighteenth Dynasty, respect-
ing the ownership of a house, or, rather, of a building site. Kenna had
built a house which another workman occupied and allowed to fall into
ruins : Kenna apparently then wished to occupy the plot himself, but was
prevented by a third workman, who declared that the king had ordered it
to be divided or shared between them. Against this Kenna protests, in-
voking apparently a decision given in the royal presence by one of the
king's scribes, according the sole ownership to him, since otherwise " it is
as if he had not built." The text is so fragmentary, that it is difficult to
be certain as to the precise point at issue, but it is clear from it, not merely

1 The Story of the Peasant : see post p. 86. The latest and most complete version is
by Mr. Griffith, P.S.B.A., June, 1892.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 59

that any case might be carried before the sacred person of the king him-
self, but that points of law as well as pleas for justice might be so sub-
mitted. Kenna implies that building a house gives a title to the land
upon which it was built, even though the building has fallen down ; but
as Egyptian, like Chinese law, distinguishes between the abstract owner-
ship of the ground and the house or other products of human labour
located on it, the claim might be open to question in a particular case.
Kenna asks the king if he really said, " Divide " : and if we may guess,
from the preservation of the stone, that the answer was favourable and he
was allowed to keep the land, the inference would be that land let or sold
for building was ceded in perpetuity, or so long as the tenant continued
in bona fide occupation.1

Another petition of the same period complains of thefts of meat, drink,
clothes, etc., committed by the workmen of a person named, while the
plaintiff was at his father's house ; he begs his master, apparently the king,
to see him righted. Probably all these cases were heard in the first
instance by scribes, like the one whose decision Kenna quotes ; and only
those who failed to obtain justice before, and had a strong conviction of
the righteousness of their cause, would think it worth while to persevere to
the last, the rather as, in primitive communities, it is thought equitable to
throw all cost and damages upon the party finally adjudged to be in the
wrong, while an insolvent offender pays in his person for the crime of
abusing the king's tribunals. In one of these documents Amenhotep is
described, like Sargon of Agade, by the rather singular title of " king of
the city," which is by itself an indication of the importance of municipal
institutions in Egypt, while in its actual context it suggests that the king
himself, like the hereditary prince, was expected to act as chief magistrate
in the city which had the honour of serving as capital of the realm.

Diodorus' description of the care spent in preparing, and the importance
attached by the Egyptians to the decisions of the great court is probably
as accurate as the rest of his information. According to him, the plead-
ings on both sides were required to be in writing, the plaintiff in the first
instance setting forth the nature of his demand or complaint and the
remedy or penalty he claimed ; a copy of this was supplied to the defend-
ant, who had to reply in writing on each head, the process being repeated,
if necessary, till the judges were satisfied that all the facts had been laid
before them, and were prepared to deliver judgment. The courts were
open to the public ; according to the Abbott papyrus, the acquittal of the
workmen accused of violating the royal tombs was pronounced "in the
great multitude of the city of Thebes." The place of assembling of the
judges is described as near by the two steles of (? Amon), north of the
platform of Amon, at the gate of the adoration of the Rechitu. The title
"doctor of the gate," which is given to a " legitimate son of the king," in
an inscription of the fourth dynasty 2 is rendered "supreme magistrate"

1 Birch and Chabas, Plainte contre un Malfaiteur, p. 202.

2 Denkmaler, ii. 15.

60 OWNERSHIP JN EGYPT.

by Brugsch, and we know that the custom of administering justice in the
gate prevailed almost or quite as long as the native monarchy. It is borne
also by Rekhmara, who is described as doing justice " without paying
attention to gifts, approaches, offerings, judging equally the poor and the
rich : " so that " whoso made petition to him did not weep " ; making
peace between contending parties, and never failing in attention to the
facts brought before him by complainants.1

The official record of a case seems always to have included a statement
of the place where, and the judges by whom, it was tried. Thus, in a very
interesting civil action, in the reign of Rameses II., the proceedings were
held "in the judgment hall of Pharaoh, in the southern city near 'Content
with Truth,'" the great gate of Rameses II. , opposite the image of the god
Amon. The tribunal for the day — a phrase which shows that members of
the priestly college sat in rotation— consisted of the first and two other
prophets of Amon, a prophet of the temple of Mut, who was himself the
defendant ; a prophet of the temple of Chons ; two priests and choachytes
of Amon, and two other priests of the same god ; the tenth member of
the court is the scribe-accountant of the court of justice of the city. The
priests of Amon, it is apparent, formed the great majority of the court,
and things must, indeed, have been managed differently in Egypt from
all other countries, if a plaintiff, unconnected with the Temple services,
had much chance of justice before a court where his opponent was
actually among his judges. The case, so far as can be gathered from an
imperfect papyrus,2 seems to have stood as follows : — Ascribe of the royal
storehouses had given certain lands belonging to himself and his brothers
and sisters — i.e., inherited family property, of which he was titular owner
on behalf of the rest, — to the Temple of Mut, not as an absolute gift, since
he intended to reserve the usufruct to himself, but in the sort of ownership
which plays a considerable part in Egyptian law and is practically a rever-
sionary right, distinct from occupancy or use. For some time, however,
the donor had omitted to claim the produce of the fields ; possibly he had
been absent, and they had been cultivated meanwhile by the temple agents;
but, at all events, he had afterwards resumed possession, and now called
upon the priest of Mut to give up to him "the half of his harvest of corn
and fresh vegetables." It is impossible to make out exactly what the scribe
had meant to give and what the priest had tried to take ; but the conclusion
is altogether creditable to the impartiality of the tribunal, for the judgment
endorses the scribe's claim on the half harvest, and the priest expresses his
acquiescence by the formula : I do (as commanded), yea I.

At the time of the demotic chronicle, translated by M. Revillout,3 the
tribunal of the judges of the priests of Amon or "the judges of Thebes "
retained its jurisdiction as under the Ramessids, and priestly courts con-

1 Mem. de la Mission Fran^aise au Caire, Tombe de Rekhmara, Ph. Virey, pp. 14, 27.

2 " Beitrage z. Kenntniss des ag. Gerichtsverfahrens." A. Erman, s£g. Zeitschrift,
p. 71, 1879.

8 Revue Egyplologique, vol. i. p. 57.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 61

tinued to deal with the affairs of natives in accordance with the ancient
usages, not only under the Lagidae but, to some extent, even as late as under
the Antonines. It is stated that when Amasis gave to his Greek mercenaries
the best lands of the temples of Memphis, Bubastis, and Heliopolis, the
priests appealed. But the king, instead of referring the matter, as would
have been the regular and customary course, to the supreme tribunal of
the thirty judges, had it decided by his privy council in his own interest.
And we may take it as a last tribute to the impartiality of the priestly
judges that down to this period they were still regarded as competent
to administer equal justice, even in causes which concerned their own
class.

Another ancient institution, of which we know even less than of the
tribunal of the thirty, is that of the " Six great Houses." The thirty judges
were members of these, and the chief of the judges was a member of all
six.1 It is possible that they represent something answering to the Six
Boards which are an ancient feature in the constitution of China, and, if so,
the name probably lingered after the institution was virtually defunct. A
great dwelling-place of the Six existed in several towns of the Ancient and
the Middle Empire and during the antiquarian revival of the Saite Dynasty.
An officer of the Fifth Dynasty is called her sesteta, master of the secret
of the mysterious words of the great house of the Six.2 Una in the Sixth
Dynasty boasts of having access to the interior of the palace and " the
House of the Six." A Queen Mentuhotep, of the Eleventh Dynasty, is
described as daughter of the Director of the Six Great Houses.3 And on a
statue of one Eimeri, who lived under the Sebek-hoteps of the Thirteenth
Dynasty, he is called "Chief of the Great House of the Six of Newer-ka-ra,"
i.e., of a Six connected with the worship of a deceased king. Rekhmara, in
the Eighteenth Dynasty, also bears among his other titles that of "Chief of
the Great Council of the Six.4 Such a use of the number six is not com-
mon, and it would be remarkable if its use in Egypt were connected with
the sexagesimal system of Babylonia, and the magistracies of Six Hundred
met with where the same influence is suspected.

A manual of the Egyptian hierarchy, probably compiled between the
Twenty-first and Twenty-sixth Dynasties, and translated by M. Maspero,5
gives an instructive enumeration of the various classes of persons in the
employ of the State. The list opens, for the sake of completeness, with
the heavenly bodies and the various known forms of earth and water.
Then follow in order : gods, goddesses, male and female spirits, i.e., the
dead, then the reigning king, the queen consort, the queen mother, the
royal children, hereditary princes, chief governors, (zat) sole friend (of

1 Erman, sEg. u. sEg. Leben, i. 12.

2 Dictionnairc Archeologiqiie, P. Pierret, p. 575. Virey, however, interprets the
same title, her sesteta, borne by Rekhmara, as "superior of the secret things," — chief
of the keepers of hidden (i e. precious) objects, in other words, Treasurer. (Mem. de
la Mission Fran$aise au Caire, vol. i. 48.)

3 P.S.ff.A., xiv. 41. 4 Virey, I.e., p. 12.
5 Journal Asiatiqtie, 8th series, vol. xi. p. 250.

62 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

Pharaoh), royal son, eldest son, and the various officers in nearest attend-
ance on the ruler. The order of precedence is curious in several respects,
and will be referred to again ; but the whole list is worth abridging
merely as an indication of the composition of the Egyptian bureaucracy.

There is no special recognition of the staff of the judicial tribunals ;
the superiors of the scribes of the rolls of the great court, who registered
the decrees of the national judges, are mentioned among the officers of
finance and various branches of civil administration. In the same table,
among the first group of high officers, including apparently only those who
were in close personal attendance upon the king, there are some described
as " Masters of the Hall of Audience of their lord, l.h.s.1," whom M.
Maspero conceives to be the nobles charged to keep order in the kha of
the king, where Pharaoh gave public audience and administered justice.
The document is divided into sections, within each of which precedence
seems to be counted separately, so that it gives some clue to the arrange-
ment of the internal administration. The first group seems to include the
highest personages of the king's court. The second group begins with the
nomarch, who certainly stood higher in dignity than the lowest officers of
the preceding group, namely, the royal scribes of the storehouse,2 of every-
thing contained in the royal palaces. The nomarch viewed as an officer
of the king was simply a local governor of the highest rank ; next to him,
and exercising, perhaps, functions of almost equal importance, was the chief
of the infantry, who was allowed the services of a lieutenant and also acted
as scribe of the warriors. Then came the chancellor of the exchequer, the
chief of the double white house of silver and gold, — " double " to hold the
treasures of the northern and the southern kingdoms, and white,3 as
official buildings alone are still in Egypt. The messenger or delegate of
the king in foreign parts, who comes next, was a financial agent dealing with
the spoil or tribute due to the king. Then follow the directors of the royal
oxen, slaves, and horses, and the officers of the charioteers and cavalry.
Some of these officers certainly seem to belong to the central administration,
though the objects under their control would be scattered in the provinces;
it may be on the latter account that they appear among the officers of the
nomes.

Next to them we find the officers of the nomarch's court : the " chief of
the scribes of the table of all the gods " ; and the " chief of the prophets
of the North and South," that is, of the prophets of such of the national
gods as have temples within the district. The latter personage is a sort of
local pope, enjoying in miniature the same kind of religious supremacy as
the Pharaohs ; the title was therefore habitually claimed by the hereditary
princes as their own of right, or bestowed on the nomarchs as a grant from
the king. The nomarch of Siout was, as such, chief prophet, apart from
his own hereditary place in the priesthood ; indeed, Erman is of opinion

1 "Life, health, strength," a formula always used after the name of Pharaoh.

2 This was the rank of the plaintiff in the case against the priest of Mut, so that the
issue was really between a servant of the king and of the temple.

3 With whitewash.

THE MONARCHY AND THE ROYAL OFFICERS. 63

that the "first great one" of each district, with an independent organization,
was, by inheritance, only chief priest and landed proprietor, and depended
for the governorship on the king's appointment ; and in some cases it is
certainly clear that the hereditary title was retained by persons who did
not exercise the office normally associated with it. The last person in the
list of local officers is the reis or overseer of royal workmen, whether
employed on canals, agriculture, or in any other way.

The third section deals exclusively with the officers of taxation and
finance, with such inspection of the lands and waters as is necessary for the
just assessment of their contributions. If there was an Egyptian Board of
Finance, it is of these officers that it would have been composed, for the
treasurer, already mentioned, may have had literally nothing to do, save to
guard and give out for use the hoards handed over to his keeping by the
revenue collectors.

The fourth or sacerdotal section begins with the two so-called roll-
bearers, or Cher-heb, who presided respectively over the religious cere-
monies of the two kingdoms ; they have the rank of royal scribe, the title
of " scribes of the double white house, expert in their functions, officiat-
ing for the king of Upper and Lower Egypt," and their function was
evidently that of chaplain to the king, the real chief of the national reli-
gion. After these come the three great high priests of Thebes, Heliopo-
lis, and Memphis. Then, by a somewhat inexplicable transition, follow a
number of secular officials, the chief of the double granaries of the south
and north ; the butchers of the king in the palace ; the chief of the store-
rooms of the royal palace, containing wines, stuffs, and other miscellaneous
commodities ; and the chief of the house of cakes and vegetables of the
master of two worlds.

Why the purveyors for the palace and court of the king should be intro-
duced in the midst of the priests and scribes of the priesthood is difficult
to divine. The temples and princes had granaries and storehouses as well
as the king, and M. Maspero thinks that the above-named are temple
officers, called after those of the royal palace ; but taking the list as a
whole, it seems rather as if we had first the great officers of the king ; then
the great officers of the nomes ; then the chief personages of the hier-
archy ; and lastly, the chief and the inferior domestic servants of the king
and of the temples. It is true that upon this view a very humble place is
assigned to the regular clergy ; but the whole tendency of our enquiries is
to show that mere priests, temple servants, holding no offices of state, were
not particularly exalted personages.

After the officers above enumerated, the list returns to the religious
orders. The " scribe who establishes the endowments of all the gods "
is followed by the clergy properly so-called ; the prophets, the divine
fathers, the priests, and the roll-bearers, i.e., the assistant celebrants or
deacons. There were four classes of prophets, and two of hierogrammats,
the " scribes of the house of the god," who copied, commented, or
composed religious texts. After sacristans and watchmen, a number of

64 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

inferior attendants are enumerated : the bearers of offerings ; those who
strew reeds for the processions ; the militia or armed guard of temple vas-
sals, and the man who kills the sacrificial victims. These are followed by
the cooks, the bakers, or confectioners, and others who prepare different
articles of provisions, and who represent the counterpart, in the temple
services, to the royal purveyors.

Last of all, the artisans are enumerated, beginning apparently with those
employed by the temples — the carpenter, the engraver, the stone-cutter,
the sculptor, the blacksmith, the goldsmith, the chaser, the founder, and
the like ; but these are followed by the royal shoemaker and various other
tradesmen, who have nothing to do with the temples. One is tempted
to ask : Is it possible that there was at one time a separate section dealing
exclusively with artisans ? and that — as in China, the corresponding
portion of the constitutional classic, known as the rites of Chow, had
been suffered to disappear altogether — in Egypt parts had survived and
become mixed with the section properly devoted to the hierarchy alone?
The question must remain open, unless other texts are found to throw
light upon it ; but the conjecture is not improbable. The authorship
of the regulations concerning the hierarchy and government of Egypt
are ascribed to Thoth, the prime minister of Horus ; and, in Egypt, pre-
historic antiquity is only claimed for institutions which are really as old
as the earliest records of the country.

CHAPTER II.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER.
§ i. FERTILITY AND FOOD.

THE history of the most ancient empires of the Old World presents us
with a choice of mysteries. Sometimes our difficulty is to explain the
past greatness of a land which seems now so little fitted to be the seat of
empire ; and sometimes, again, we are at a loss to account for the depart-
ure of political supremacy from countries which still continue the especial
favourites of Nature. Egypt, the land of paradox, confronts us with the
latter problem. Centuries before the beginning of our era, the immense
duration of Egyptian civilization ranked among the marvels of history ;
and while this marvel has lost none of its strangeness for later ages, with
their accumulating examples of contrasted instability, the explanation of
the decay and death of this civilization has now to be joined with that of
its grandeur and duration.

The conviction is gaining ground among historians that the political
decay of nations is always prepared or preceded by profound if secret
economic disorganization. If this be so, we have to ask : By what secret
did the Egypt of the Pharaohs succeed in escaping the doom of such
disorganization for a period trebling the duration of the most stable
monarchies of the West ?

The qualities of climate and race do not make up history by themselves,
but the solution of the problem may be found in the almost unique juxta-
position of a climate, a race, and a form of government — all of them
stable in themselves and co-operating, by their most strongly marked char-
acteristics, to perpetuate a modus vivendi, which was at once the product
and the condition of sustained equilibrium.

Of the climate of Egypt little need be said. The peculiar fitness of
the Nile Valley for the development of the highest forms of primitive
civilization is admitted and understood. The regularity of the seasons
makes forethought easy; the irresistible inundation makes it necessary;
and industry had only, as it were, to take its cue from Nature, to be im-
pelled towards the highest triumphs of agricultural art. The earliest
dwellers in the " black land " had to live from year to year as ruder tribes
live from day to day ; and, though the conditions of life were thus rigor-
ously fixed, there was nothing rigorous about the conditions except their
fixity. Greek writers, familiar with the most fertile of the Mediterranean
shores, contrast the severity of the struggle for existence elsewhere with the
ready productiveness of Egypt : " only the Egyptians gather the fruits of

p.c. 6s F

66 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

husbandry with little cost or labour." 1 Unlike those few tropical regions
where labour is unnecessary, Nature here does nothing without the help of
man; but the little labour necessary to secure the subsistence of the
people is productive enough to leave a surplus over available for accumu-
lation. To use their own phrase, what " Heaven gave, Earth brought
forth, and the Nile bore along," was ample for all the dwellers on its
shores. Almost the first thing we know of the ancient Egyptians is their
wealth.

Until the secret of the hieroglyphs was unravelled, popular knowledge
on the subject of ancient Egypt was practically limited to the incidental
revelations of the Old Testament. " Because there were no graves in
Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness ? " is the ironical
question put by the malcontent fugitives to Moses. Their regrets were
for the days when they " sat by the flesh-pots, and did eat bread to the
full ; " and they retained tender memories of the " fish which they did eat
in Egypt freely, the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the
onions, and the garlic." Picturesque tradition is seldom at once so full
and so veracious. Ancient Egypt was pre-eminently a land of tombs and
abundant food, and we can judge how strongly marked these characteris-
tics must have been for a faithful record of them to have been handed
down to the latest ages in the sacred books of another people ; and espe-
cially how abundant the food supply must have been, when even oppressed
foreign slaves ate their fill ungrudged. Nor is the value of the Hebrew
testimony in any way impaired, if, like most modern historians, we suppose
that Jewish writers who describe the age of Rameses acquired their
knowledge of Egypt in or after the age of Shishak.

The earliest hieroglyphs tell the same story. The kings of the ancient
monarchy built themselves tombs, which bid' fair to last as long as the
human race ; the wealthy nobles of the same period commemorated on
the walls of their funeral chambers all the familiar circumstances of their
cheerful daily life ; and the first impression made by the faithful record,
upon modern tourists from the West, is of the immense abundance of the
food supply, and the wealth in kind possessed by the great landowners of
the third millennium, u.c. Here is an English traveller's version of the
plain picture story which one of the earliest and wealthiest of these nobles
has bequeathed to us. " Ti was a wealthy man, and his wealth was of the
agricultural sort. He owned flocks and herds and vassals in plenty. He
kept many kinds of birds and beasts — geese, ducks, pigeons, cranes, oxen,
goats, donkeys, antelopes, and gazelles. He was fond of fishing and
fowling, and used sometimes to go after crocodiles and hippopotami, which
came down as low as Memphis in his time. He was a kind husband, too,
and a good father, and loved to share his pleasures with his family. Here
we see him sitting in state with his wife and children, while professional
singers and dancers performed before them. Yonder they walk out to-
gether and look on while the farm servants are at work, and watch the

1 Diod., i. 3.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 67

coming in of the boats that bring home the produce of Ti's more distant
lands. Here the geese are being driven home ; the cows are crossing a
ford ; the oxen are ploughing ; the sower is scattering his seed ; the reaper
plies his sickle ; the oxen tread the grain ; the corn is stored away in the
granary. There are evidently no independent tradespeople in these early
days of the world. Ti has his own artificers on his own estate, and all
his goods and chattels are home-made. Here the carpenters are fashion-
ing new furniture for the house ; the shipwrights are busy on new boats ;
the potters mould pots ; the metal-workers smelt ingots of red gold. It is
plain that Ti lived like a king within his own boundaries." l

And as Ti lived within his own estates, so the mightiest kings of Upper
and Lower Egypt lived amongst their possessions and their great officers,
of whom some were hereditary chiefs or princes, claiming kinship with
Pharaoh in their own right, and others, like Ti himself, men of humble
birth, who were rewarded with offices and estates, and the hand of a well-
born bride, for their services to the king. The description has the merit,
without any theoretical arriere pensee, of drawing attention to what is
really the fundamental characteristic of the social and industrial economy
of Egypt. Any modern owning such estates and receiving such produce
from them would be a wealthy man ; just such wealth made the import-
ance of the landed aristocracy of England and of Rome ; the concentration
of just such wealth in few and selfish hands caused the ruin of Italy, as
the bond of common citizenship was loosed between the few rich and the
many poor. Egypt began with latifundia^ and flourished for three thou-
sand years ; and if hints for securing such monumental fixity of tenure could
be brought back thence by the landowners of to-day, pilgrims would not
be wanting to the land of the Sphinx.

A strict regard for political economy will, however, forbid this natural use
of the term wealth to describe the abundant possessions of the ancient Ti.
Economically speaking, Ti's flocks and herds, fish and fruit, were not
wealth, for they had no exchangeable value. He had no wish to sell them,
for the best of reasons : there was no one to buy them from him, and no
one to sell to him anything that he wished for, and had not got, in ex-
change. The only use of this accumulation of food in esse and in posse
was to be eaten, enjoyed, distributed, and suitably dedicated to the gods
and the spirits of the deceased. When corn is scarce or costly, there is
some temptation to muzzle the ox that treads it ; but the increase of Ti's
fields and flocks was too abundant for him to grudge the troops of servants,
who gathered in his harvests, their daily seat by his well-filled flesh-pots.
He did not buy their services, but he directed and controlled their labour
and he gave them food : by the bounty of Nature he escaped the tempta-
tion not to give them food enough, and while the mass of the population
have enough to eat, and free access to the rudimentary pleasures of ex-
istence, the seeds of revolution ripen slowly or not at all.

The economy of ancient Egypt may be summed up in two words: forced
1 A Thousand Miles up the Nile, by Amelia Edwards, pp. 89, 90.

68 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

labour and subsistence wages. The word which Egyptologists translate
" subject" means literally " eater of rations." Both property and industry
were more developed in Egypt than in any surviving community where
the political superior, as such, is the chief or sole employer of labour. In
the most fertile of the South Sea Islands the relation between the common
people and the chiefs is of this kind, the latter being entitled to call upon
their followers to build a house or a canoe, though they are also expected
to feed those who work for them.1 If they receive food one day as tribute,
they distribute it the next as giver of a feast. The Chinese classics de-
scribe the life of the black-haired people at an earlier stage than that
reached in Egypt at the time of the oldest monuments, and at this earlier
stage the parallel to the feasts and working parties of the Fijians is as
close as possible. Chinese imperialism developed so much on the same
lines as Egyptian, that we can hardly be wrong in supposing Egyptian
industry to have passed through the same earlier stages, and the continued
use of the term " ration eaters" is a valuable witness to the persistence of the
archaic compact, by which the great man gives food and the little people
labour. In China the increase of population and of the area governed
made the relation between rulers and subjects less direct, so that, after the
feudal period, the bulk of the people employed themselves, and only
paid taxes in kind, while the civil and military officials alone ate the emperor's
rations ; but the theory of the ruler's responsibility for the food supply of
the people survives there still ; and the political system of Egypt never
became sufficiently complicated to endanger its continuance.

When the king or the rich noble had provided for himself all the simple
machinery for enjoying life with which he was acquainted, he did not
amuse himself by complicating the machinery ; having provided cheerfully
for his life, he amused himself by providing cheerfully for the longer ages
when he would no longer live, and what we may call his unexchangeable
surplus of real property was devoted to this amusement ; all the labour
that was not needed for the production of food was employed in the
erection of monuments or graves, and all the food that was not needed for
the producers of food for the living was given to the builders of "resting
places " for the dead.

The Pyramids, it has been said with truth, were built for want of any
other opening for the investment of capital.2 It was in the power of a
tyrannical king to impoverish his subjects by withdrawing too many
labourers from agriculture for employment upon public works, and this
abuse no doubt prevailed from time to time. But use and wont counted
for much in Egypt, and the standard of comfort established amongst the
labourers on such estates as Ti's could not be permanently lowered by a
single prince. Full granaries to feed the workmen were the first condition
of great works, and in Egypt it must have been easier to replenish the
granaries by releasing the workmen than to retain them at their task upon

1 H. S. Cooper, Coral Lands, p. 162 ff.

2 F. Barham Zincke, Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedive, p. 61.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 69

starvation wages. Even foreign labourers, toiling beneath the overseer's
stick, were not grudged their food, though their tasks may have been
heavier than merciful rulers would have imposed on native subjects.

This is the permanent feature common to the monarchy of the Sixth,
the Twelfth, and the Nineteenth Dynasties alike. The people were always
in a sufficiently prosperous state to support an expensive Government — one
positively so by its magnificence, or negatively so from its weakness and
consequent exposure to attacks from without. But the Government, on the
one hand, never sank so low as to reduce the natural wealth of the country
beyond that point of sufficiency ; on the other, its most lavish expenditure
was not of a kind to drain unproductively all the sources of this wealth.
Before any monuments could be erected capable of surviving to the
present day, before the vast ambition to create such monuments could
occur even to a despot's mind, Egypt must have accumulated surplus stores
of wealth and labour power, more than equalling those treasures of the
New World, which were the wonder of its Spanish conquerors.

Famine, an ever-present danger in Mexico, as in China and India, was
almost unknown in Egypt. The inundation seldom fails for two years in
succession, and any ordinary year left a surplus sufficient to make good the
deficiency of two or three bad harvests. The chief burden on the indus-
trial population was the State dues, and these were levied on land exactly
in proportion to its ability to defray them. Land regularly inundated by
the Nile was most heavily taxed, then land capable of artificial irrigation,
while land not irrigated at all was free or nearly so.1 It would follow from
this that a low Nile meant low taxation,2 and to the cultivator, so far as
the Government was concerned, at least immunity from debt ; while low
taxation, to the Government itself meant nothing more than the arrest of
accumulation. And as the ultimate destiny of the accumulated grain was
always the maintenance of labourers, terms of scarcity only involved the
arrest of their employment upon monuments and public works rather than
agriculture. Agriculture had to provide the surplus out of which unpro-
ductive labour was maintained, and the ruler had obviously no inducement
to cut off the source of his own wealth by withdrawing too large a propor-
tion of the population at once from the labours which maintained the rest.

The agricultural population habitually produced by their labour more
food than they consumed. It was the rule for them to produce enough for
their own maintenance, and something to spare for the privileged few ;
this surplus was withdrawn from the producers year by year, so that they
themselves had no opportunities of accumulating wealth, and it was spent,
so far as its titular owners were concerned, on unproductive works. Con-
sidering the industrial organization of the country, it could not, however,
have been laid out more to the advantage of the labourers. The hoards
of the wealthy served virtually as grain banks, upon which a proportion of

1 It was one of the most oppressive of Mehemet All's measures, to enforce the cultiva-
tion of all land, good or bad, in order to establish a claim for taxation upon all.

2 Strabo expressly says that a high Nile means large revenue from taxes (xvii. I. 48).

70 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

the cultivators could draw for wages when their services were not required
to keep up the food supply for current necessities.

Egyptian corn was not sent out of the country to buy foreign luxuries or
articles of ostentation for which the demand could be indefinitely increased,
so as to swallow up all the accumulations of the rich ; neither was the
demand for labourers limited by the power of the capitalist to drive a
remunerative trade in the produce of their work. Practically the whole of
the hoarded food was spent in maintaining the " eaters of rations/' and as
in no case did they expect or receive more than maintenance, they
submitted without any sense of injury to the regime which caused the
spare labour of the community (i.e. their own) to be spent in erecting royal
monuments, private tombs, temples of the gods, and in maintaining officers,
priests, and sacred animals, instead of in raising the general standard of
comfort or luxury.

On the other hand, as monuments could only be built if there were
workers to hew and drag the stones, and food to feed them withal, if the
peasant's share of the food supply fell short of his needs, it was taken for
granted that those to whom his labour was habitually useful should keep
him alive, irrespective of any present demand for his services ; and in
practice, no doubt, the masses were fed in bad years by free distribution of
grain, the equivalent of which in labour must have been given, as a rule,
before or after, not during the exceptional year of scarcity. In com-
munities where goods change hands nominally by way of gift instead of
mercantile exchange, there is not necessarily more real liberality on either
side, but the terminology of thought makes it seem more natural, than
under the modern industrial system, for the real equivalents to be exchanged
at different times, without interest accruing from the delay. The idea of
buying labour as a commodity had not yet arisen, and there was therefore
still less room for the thought of it as a commodity that must be paid for
on delivery or not at all. The relations between all sections of the com-
munity were conceived as continuous, or life-long, and their character was
not altered by temporary changes in the circumstances of one or another.

This is not a matter of inference or conjecture ; more than one of the
time-books kept by Egyptian foremen have been happily preserved to us,
in which we can compare the diligence of different workmen, strike an
average as to the regularity of the workers, judge as to the character of the
excuses accepted from absentees, and, above all things, discover that
though our ration-eaters receive their allowance monthly or fortnightly,
their wages are virtually a fixed sum, and are paid in full,1 whether they
have been absent by their own fault, misfortune, or choice, or unemployed
owing to the overseer having no tasks ready for them. In one case the
workmen have nothing to do for two of the winter months, and during the
next two only work about half-time ; in another, where the absences
recorded seem voluntary or accidental, illness, a religious sacrifice, or a

1 Erman, p. 182. Deiix papyrus hieratiques iltt musee de Turin. Lieblein and
Chabas. Cf. also leitschriftfur. Mg. Spr. u. Alth., 1893, p. 64.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 71

ceremonial impurity are the causes most commonly alleged. The time
lost by individuals in the course of a year varies from one or two days to
two or three weeks, but in neither case does it occur to the Egyptian
employer or his representative to economize in his wages bill by expecting
the workmen to live at their own expense during the days or months
when from choice or necessity, on either side, there is no work to be
done.

If we could imagine an Egyptian scribe set to translate any European
text-book of economics, we should probably find the capitalist described
in his version not as an " employer of labour " or " giver of work," but as
a " giver of food," or rations ; and the difference in the point of view so
indicated is far from being only verbal. On the modern theory the free
and irresponsible capitalist who wishes, for reasons of his own, to have
certain work done, puts the doing up to auction (an auction of the Dutch
sort), and such workmen as bid successfully for the job may get a living by
it if they can ; while those who fail to get a living so, or in any other way,
are invited to learn from that experience, that their parents did wrong in
believing, with the ancient sages of Egypt, that a " wise man founds a
house and takes a wife, who loves him, that he may have a son born like
himself."

The first Egyptian capitalists were chiefs of whom the greatest became
king of the whole land. Later on, in a sense, the king is the only
capitalist ; his favourites do not accumulate for themselves, either by
usury, commerce, or the employment of labour in manufactures or agricul-
ture ; they only receive by gift a share in his accumulations, and as these
consist partly in the surplus produce, animal and vegetable, which main-
tains the labouring crowds, and partly in the raw material for monumental
works, such a delegation of the Pharaoh's power to spend had no
tendency to impoverish the people. The earliest inscriptions sometimes
enumerate as many as twenty or thirty separate estates in different
provinces as belonging to a single lord,1 and as each of them is designated
by a name, usually compounded of that of the owner and of a king,2 we
may conclude that they were originally bestowed as royal grants. But
the despotism of the Pharaoh was paternal. The unwritten law of the
land recognised it as a plain duty of the royal father to feed his people in
the rare event of a time of scarcity, and the position of the peasant
occupiers was in no way changed for the worse, when one of the royal
estates was made over to an officer or a governor.

In the Song of the Harper, attributed to the Eighteenth Dynasty, the
duty of the rich is traced out for them on this supposition : " Give bread
to him whose field is barren, thy name will be glorious in posterity for
evermore." Even the phrases used to describe the uncertainty of life
show the way in which life was spent while it lasted. "Those who have
magazines full of bread to spend, even they shall encounter the hour of a

1 Revue Archeologique, Sept. 1864.

2 Lepsius, Denkmaler, ii. 12, 47, etc.

72 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

last end," 1 and in the story of Saneha, attributed to the Twelfth Dynasty,
the hero's prosperity is described by saying that, in the land which he
entered perishing with hunger, he is now "a giver of bread"2 to others.
Famine was rare, and when it occurred, it was mitigated by the generosity
of the righteous rich, not aggravated by speculative greed.

The stability of Egyptian society can only be explained by two facts
taken together : the natural fertility of the country, which made it possible
for the people to enjoy a tolerable existence while indulging the magni-
ficent ambitions of their lords ; and the fixed minimum of humanity in the
rulers, which made them rest content with the large tribute they could
exact without encroaching upon the fixed minimum of well-being which
satisfied their subjects. The permanent submission to a system of forced
labour was perhaps an affair of race ; and it was an affair of climate that
rulers powerful and despotic enough to command the labour of a nation
should have been able to indulge their own ambition without trenching
upon this first charge, as we may call it, upon the natural revenue for the
subsistence of the labourers. In later days the population and the
cultivated area in Egypt went on dwindling 3 under the increasing dispro-
portion between the Government exactions and the available surplus of
national wealth; and by comparison with the results of the enterprise of
Ismail Pasha, the temperance of ancient rulers seems a masterpiece of
prudent state-craft.

The interaction of physical and moral influences is curiously illustrated
by the most permanent facts of Egyptian experience. All classical writers
note with admiration the Egyptian respect for life, that penal executions
were rare, infanticide unknown, the people correspondingly docile, and
family affection strong. Travellers in Egypt, from Diodorus to Lane,
observe that children can be reared to maturity at the total cost of a few
shillings ; hence the temptation to infanticide does not exist, and parental
affection develops the more easily for not being in conflict with any
pressing material interests. According to Diodorus, children could be
reared for twenty drachms, and labourers could be nourished at a corre-
spondingly low rate.

But as each labourer in the ordinary course of things produced much
more than it was customary for him to consume, the customary possessor
of the surplus produce, like the average parent, contracted the habit of
respecting the labourer's right to consume as much as he wanted, and only
appropriated for himself what could be spared without real inconvenience
or injury. It was at once the merit and the good fortune of the Pharaohs
to have started with so feasible a contrat social; and in estimating their
merits, it must be remembered that cheap food and a large docile popula-
tion do not of themselves necessarily lead to the same results — witness the

1 Records of the Past, vi. 127. 2 Ib. New series, ii. 25.

3 The map of the French Expedition shows, about Luxor, scarcely half of the natural
valley under cultivation. For the recent sufferings of the Egyptian fellahin, see Egypt
after the War, by Villiers Stuart, M. P., 1883, passim.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 73

prevalence of female infanticide in China, and the abject poverty alike of
modern Egypt and of whole provinces in British India.

Like these countries, ancient Egypt was a land of cheap food and low
wages, but the secret of its centennial prosperity is that it was a land of
cheap labour indeed, but of still cheaper food, and therefore not a land of
the very lowest real wages. This result, obtained in ancient Egypt without
deliberate effort or design, has been constantly aimed at, with varying
success, by the Government of China, and it is evidently a sine qua non of
prosperity in States of this type. For wages to continue high, relatively to
the price of food, in a fertile agricultural country, it is not necessary for
the supply of labourers to fall short of the yearly demand ; it is sufficient
if the yearly supply of food is in excess of that demand ; and this it will
be, if the natural results of industry, applied to a fertile soil, are not
frustrated by excessive exportation. Under the Pharaohs there was " corn
in Egypt " to spare for pastoral tribes that came to seek it in their distress,
or for an allied nation suffering from a year of scarcity. The sufferings of
the native cultivators began when the country was drained regularly every
year to load the corn ships for Rome, and there ceased to be a standing
surplus in the hands of a Government constitutionally bound to preserve
the people from want.

§ 2. ANCIENT AND MODERN ABUSES.

In complete harmony with the state of things reflected in the monu-
ments, we find that the whole duty of man as embodied for the Egyptians, in
the negative Confession of the Book of the Dead, appears to consist in the
duty of officials to discharge their functions without oppression. We hear
nothing about the duties of the subject populace ; the common folk were
kindly used but not highly esteemed by their lords, and the monuments
reveal nothing concerning their deeds or their deserts. The hierarchy
of scribes and officials tell their own story uncontrolled. They speak to
us out of the abundance of their long since pulseless hearts ; they lay bare
their thoughts to us with the simplicity of those who have never known,
much less halted between, two opinions ; and all their self-laudations are
directed to show how well they have discharged the duties of a ruler.

One of the first professions which the soul has to make after death,
before emerging justified l from the " Hall of Two Truths," is to the same
effect : " I have not done any wicked thing, I have not made the labouring
man do more than his task daily. ... I have not calumniated the
slave to his master. ... I have not changed the measures of the
country. ... I have not falsified measures, I have not cheated in
the weight of the balance, I have not withheld milk from the mouths of
sucklings. I have not stopped running waters, nor cut them off from their
passage in due season. . . . Oh, breath of flame, coming out of Ptah-

1 The term thus translated in most early English versions of funeral texts is rendered
by French Egyptologists Veridique, and certainly the idea is, that only the veracious
soul can escape condemnation. (Book of the Dead> ch. 125.)

74 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

ka ! I have not spared food ! Oh, Lord of Truth, coming out of the
region of Truth, I have not robbed the stream, I have not injured the
gods or calumniated the slave to his master."

The collocation in this last repeated protest may be only accidental, or it
may indicate a delicacy of feeling, which regards it as a kind of blasphemy
to slander the defenceless. The copious recognition of the heinousness of
evil-speaking is significant of two things, — the importance attached to the
spoken as well as the written word, and the general veracity of the com-
munity, which could allow such words to retain all the weight and import-
ance of a fact. As will be seen hereafter, evidence given on oath was
accepted, though unsupported, and in favour of the claim of the person
swearing ; and of course the injury inflicted by calumnies is much more
serious in a community where it is customary to believe all that people
say, than in degenerate days when it has become a proverb not to do so.
Several of the Chinese odes are directed against the slanderers, who " buzz
about like blue-flies," especially at court, and in most early states of
civilization the recognition of satires or lampoons as a cause of material
injury is due to the same simplicity. In Egypt, where it was a counsel
of perfection not to speak evil, even with truth, to do so falsely was still
so rare as to be counted among mortal sins.

Nearly every clause in the Confession would supply matter for interesting
commentary, and furnish itself the most eloquent condemnation of the
opposite conduct of later rulers, whom even a mortal tribunal refuses to
absolve.1 The seeds of all the abuses under which modern Egypt has
groaned, existed, we see, in ancient Egypt also. The difference between
the welfare and the misery of the country turns only on a question of degree ;
the abuses which under the Pharaohs were kept in check by the national
conscience, and the enlightened self-interest of the Crown, have since
reigned rampant, to the degradation of Crown and people alike.

Those who composed and rehearsed the famous Ritual of the Dead
must at least be credited with a clear vision of the consequences that
would befal a country whose rulers could not utter the above confession.
It would have fared ill with Mehemet Ali, at the clause " I have not
changed the measures of the country," before the dread tribunal, where
Horus weighs the heart of the deceased against an ostrich feather, and
the god with the head of an ibis, the scribe of Truth, writes down the
result. There is something almost grotesque in Burckhardt's account2 of
the gradual dwindling, like the peau de chagrin, of the " Kassaba," or rod
used in measuring land, so that in 1817 the length was only three-quarters
of what it had been twelve years before. Its lawful length was twenty-four

1 Cf. Lane's description of an impressive incident at the funeral of a tyrannical Bey ;
when the Sheikh said to the assembled congregation : " Give your testimony concerning
him," no one ventured to utter the conventional response : " He was of the righteous,"
and the Sheikh in confusion could only mutter : " May God have mercy on him," while
the silence passed unanswerable judgment. (Manners and Customs of the Modern
ptians^ 5th ed. p. 157.)
Arabic Proverbs > 471.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 75

fists, or the space covered by a hand grasping the rod, from thumb to
little finger ; but unfortunately the size of fists may be conceived to vary,
and every two or three years an inch was taken off the length of the official
rod ; and as taxation continued to be assessed upon the feddan, containing
three hundred kassabas, every inch taken off the latter meant ^20,000 or
^30,000 added to the annual imposts. A few instances of this sort of
iniquity explain the tendency of all ancient races to reckon the observance
of " a just weight and a just balance " among the first of religious duties.
A classical formula for the king's praise is to the effect, " Thy tongue is a
balance; thy lips are a standard measure, according to the just scales of
the God Thoth." And we find in the list of spoil taken by Thothmes III.
mention made of ell-measures, with heads of ivory, ebony, and cedar, inlaid
with gold, as if such standards were habitually reckoned among the ruler's
more valuable possessions, or perhaps bestowed upon his favourites at
once as the tools and the insignia of office.

The English commissioners sent by the Egyptian Government for the
relief of famine in Upper Egypt in 1878, again comment unconsciously
upon the clause, " I have not withheld milk from the mouths of suck-
lings." A correspondent of the Times, after describing the distribution
of bread among adults, and the recovery of starving children upon a small
additional allowance of milk, goes on to say : " It is melancholy to think
that no milk could be given at other places where the need was more
pressing . . . but after consulting the highest native officials of the
province, the commissioners came to the conclusion, and I dare not say
they were wrong, that to order milk where there was no European to
see it actually administered, would have been simply to put money in the
pockets of the Sheik-el-Beled." l The famine in question was a money,
not a grain famine ; bread was never dear, but the whole of the insufficient
crop of the peasants had been swept away for taxes, and they had literally
nothing left, either to live upon or to sell for food. The ex-Khedive
indeed may fairly compete with Mehemet Ali for the palm of ingenuity
awarded by Ampere to the latter for his mastery of the insoluble problem
of taxing wealth that does not exist : " // a supprime la propricte et conserve
rimpot" 2 It is of such that the charitable hieroglyphics still speak : " May
he not exist and may his son not sit in his seat."

The protestation, " I have not stopped running waters ... I have
not robbed the streams," of course refers to the just control of the irrigation
works.3 The existence of these is even older than the monarchy, and the
great dyke attributed to Menes could only have been attempted after
considerable skill and experience had been acquired. Officers in charge
of the waters or canals are mentioned in several monuments, and in a
formal enumeration of all kinds and degrees of created things, the vocabu-

1 A Ride in Egypt. W. J. Loftie. App., p. 381.

2 Voyage en Egypt et en Nubie. J. J. Ampere, p. 251, 1868.

3 Memoire sur ? economic politique, V administration et la legislation de VEgypte au
temps des Lagides, by Felix Robiou, p. 10, 1875.

76 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

lary applicable to dry land is scanty in comparison to that which deals with
the waters. In addition to the hieroglyph for "nome," the idea of " ways,"
"moving on," "past time," and the like, are indicated by
another sign which evidently represented a watercourse, bordered
with trees, and from the senses given it, one large enough to
be used for navigation.1 The formation of Lake Moeris, in the Twelfth
Dynasty, has been justly described as the greatest work ever undertaken
by a Government solely for the public benefit. Throughout the Pharaonic
period, this all-important branch of the administration continued to receive
the necessary care, and it is probable that the papyrus just referred to,
though belonging to the post-Ramesid period, preserves the terms of
classification used at far earlier dates.

The Ptolemies in the main kept up the old national forms of administra-
tion, and there was no general decay of the irrigation works under them,
though it is possible that the system of farming the taxes, which they intro-
duced, may have paved the way for corruption in this part of the adminis-
tration. A very expensive system of State control and supervision had to
be kept up in order to secure the watering of the whole cultivated tract,
and the Romans, whose only interest in Egypt was as a source of revenue,
began the ruin of its wealth by economising in the machinery of supervision.

The necessary labour for cleansing the canals and repairing the dykes
had always been provided by the cultivators of a district ; but then, as now,
a strong and honest central authority was needed to see, first, that the labour
of the peasants was really expended upon the public works, by which they
themselves were to benefit, and, secondly, that adjacent villages did not
defraud each other, and try to secure water enough for their immediate
necessities, without keeping up the works required to procure the same
abundance permanently for all their neighbours as well. Paternal centrali-
zation was necessary to protect the national prosperity against the disinte-
grating tendencies of what may be called parochial individualism ; and it is
remarkable that the needful checks should have been so effectively supplied,
in the absence of any serious political organization ; while political States
still fail to establish any central social influence capable of controlling the
disintegrating tendencies of personal individualism, a force which must be
by nature the feebler of the two.

The description of all the things that Ptah has created, and that Thoth
has registered beneath the roof of Ra, which we owe to the scribe Ameno-
phis,2 is worth quoting at length, as it is evidently rather a legal than a
literary or philosophical catalogue, the object being to enumerate all those
varieties of land and water which require different regulations concerning
their occupation, use, or culture. After the heavenly bodies and such
atmospheric phenomena as thunder, dawn, the sun's ray, etc., the list
proceeds as follows : river, brook, spring, torrent, ocean, inundation, arm

1 Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de V Orient (German tr.), p. 588.

2 In the Manual of Hieratic Precedence, translated by M. Maspero, referred to above,
p. 61.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 77

of the Nile, sea, waves, lake, piece of water, well, cistern, reservoir ; high
water (i.e., water stationary at the height of the inundation), pond. Upper
canton, lower canton, low-lying lands or shoals, backwaters, trenches, ditches,
broads, swamps, border-lands, beaches, highways, dykes, islands, plains,
high lands, hillocks, clays, season-crops, woods, sands, mud, uncultivated
land, cultivated land. In the title, a short description of the earth and all
that it contains reduces all these classes to four — the springing waters, the
mountains, the inundation, and the sea. Unfortunately, we have no work
on the economy of ancient Egypt corresponding to the Chow-Li, which gives
so full an account of the theory of Chinese administration ; and the sense of
the hieroglyphs is not so certain that we can judge of the technical signifi-
cance of all the various terms employed. But we get a general impression of
a system of culture and control resembling that of ancient China, in which
cultivated land is a thing apart ; and all other land or water, hills, rivers,
wastes, with their several produce, are regarded as public property, and
their enjoyment or appropriation by individuals subjected to regulation by
the central authority.

§ 3. AGRICULTURE AND CATTLE FARMING.

The valley of the Nile is naturally divided into lands adjoining the river,
plains watered by canals leading directly from it, and the extremities of the
cultivated land which the inundation may sometimes fail to reach, and
sometimes reach so late that there is not time to sow fresh crops after the
retreat of the waters. As in China, the largest canals, or canalized rivers,
would serve as a boundary at once to enclose and to irrigate the separate
provinces; smaller channels would supply the villages, and within the village
territory each plot would have its own small trench or ditches.

The householders, to whom the maxims of the scribe Ani are addressed,
are neither great men nor poverty-stricken peasants ; it is assumed that their
possessions will include an irrigated enclosure, arable land surrounded by
hedges, sycamores planted in a circle, well ordered round the dwelling-
place, and flowers of all sorts by the handful. Having this, a man should
rest content, without seeking to enlarge his borders. Even the different
sorts of labourers, whose woes are described in the Praises of Learning,
have a home and land of the same type on a small scale, for he is to be
pitied, because it is not till nightfall that he is able to return to his garden
and orchard, — the enclosure or avenue of trees answering to the Chinese
mulberry grove, inside of which the family enjoyed the strictest privacy.

Most probably the different words used for water channels indicate their
size, or that of the enclosure they irrigate, which, in the latter case, would
be of very small extent ; and if so, it may be possible to extort from the
hieroglyphs themselves some hints as to their legal significance. We know
that the measurement of lands, the making of canals, and the inspection of
dams were carefully attended to by Government officials from the earliest
times, and the importance of this branch of the administration is betrayed
by the phrases in common use : " The scribes, the land surveyors, and the

78 OWNERSHIP JN EGYPT.

people," is one classification of those — otherwise all mankind — to whom
Amon Ra, the king of the gods, " shows the way." l

An important inscription 2 of the Twelfth Dynasty shows the king himself
superintending the restoration of the surveyor's records : " Taking posses-
sion of one town after another, he informed himself of one town, and its
boundaries to the next town, placing their frontier columns. Taking cogni-
zance of their waters according to the written documents, and reckoning it
according to their value conformably to the greatness of his love of justice.
As to Khnumhotep himself, the king distributed to him the great river over
his territory, its waters, its fields, its trees ; and his uncultivated land ex-
tended to the country of the west." The same inscription proceeds, in
almost similar terms, to speak of the deeds of the later king, Usurtasen II.,
who "restored what he found ruined; taking possession of one town after
another, he got fixed his boundary, so that he might settle the taxation
according to its income ... he assigned the surface of the unculti-
vated fields, containing as many as fifteen boundary stones, and he assigned
the surface of its cultivable lands."

The discovery of boundary stones (denoting private property) upon un-
cultivated land marks the close of one of those periods of disturbance
during which, as the "Instructions of Amenemhat" phrase it, "the land
was as a bull which had lost all memory of the past," and the once fruitful
plots lay fallow as the cultivators were driven far from home or slain.

Land which, for any reason, remained uncultivated, after the waters with-
drew produced a rich pasture much used for grazing by the owners of live-
stock, the value of which (according to Diodorus) was supposed to be
doubled by this regimen. There is an allusion to this curious kind of
temporary "common" in an hieratic papyrus translated by Mr. Goodwin.
" Twenty unploughed fields, producing fodder for the horses of the king,"
which had been first granted to the steward of the house of Rameses II.,
and then apparently allotted to somebody else, were to be restored by the
lessees to the steward, namely, besides "the royal fields, corn lands and
crops . . . the uncultivated places and all places of pleasure which ye
pay rent for" 3

It appears thus that Herodotus might have added one more instance to
his list of the cases in which the Egyptians reverse the usages of every
other nation, since they let on lease pastures and uncultivated land such as
is elsewhere enjoyed in common without payment of rent, while arable
land, which elsewhere commands the highest rent, is not let at all, but
only subject to the general land tax. The reason for the peculiarity is
however plain, and just enough : such pasture was the only land that gave
produce without the expenditure of labour, and the Crown alone was held to
be entitled to any such " unearned increment" of value. It may also have
been felt that the best method of encouraging agriculture and preventing

1 Brugsch, History of Egypt, ii. p. 194.

2 Ib. i. p. 140, Cf. Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, i. p. 161 ff. ; and Bent Hasan, pt. i.,
P. E. Newberry, p. 57 ff., 1893. 3 Hieratic Papyri, p. 252. Cambridge Essays^ 1858.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 79

suitable land from falling out of cultivation would be to insist on the
theoretical right by which all fallows reverted to the Crown. If all the
Egyptian latifundia had been turned into grazing lands, the whole economy
of the country would have been subverted, and half the population left
without either employment or food ; and as stock raising was a popular
industry from early times, the temptation to such a course may have been
sufficiently apparent to be guarded against.

In the ancient Tale of Two Brothers the younger one understands the
speech of the cattle, who tell him where the best grasses grow, and, as
with Jacob in the service of Laban, they " became exceedingly beautiful
and multiplied exceedingly " under his care ; and we may interpret this
bit of one of the oldest written folk tales in the world, by the light of
Diodorus' remarks on the skill of the Egyptian herdsmen, their knowledge
of healing plants, and their power of increasing the propagation of the
animals. To this day it is said to require special skill and management to
effect the two lambing seasons in a year ; and it is obvious that an industry
which offered such profitable rewards must have been a formidable rival
to the humble but indispensable labours of the plough and the shadoof.

But to return to the distribution of the waters : as the river rises, certain
canals at right angles to it are filled ; these are blocked by dykes at their
further ends, so that the water goes on rising in the canals to whatever
height the walls allow, and often to a level exceeding that of the natural
inundation. When the water in the canals has risen to a prescribed height,
the dykes are broken down so as to admit the water into new channels,
which are filled in the same way, and the process is repeated till the most
elevated and distant parts of the irrigable land have received their share of
the fertilizing flood : the embankments of the dykes serve as causeways
for intercourse during the inundation. If the canals are not duly cleaned,
the gain from a high Nile is lost, as the deposit of mud is greatest in the
tanks where the water is arrested, and if these are allowed to silt up gradu-
ally from the bottom, the shallower canal carries less water to the fields,
even when filled to the same apparent height.1

A stele attributed to the Twelfth Dynasty gives a list of the personages
who held at Abydos the office of clerk of the canals, charged with the dis-
tribution of the inundation ; and the god himself says of Lower Egypt :
" I flood the arable land every year, and I let the waters of the inundation
flow away by the canals." 2 When the canals are all in order and the inunda-
tion rises to the normal height, the possibility of maladministration lies
exactly in " keeping back the waters." If the main channel is kept
dammed up till the arm which supplies a particular town or village has
received more than its share, those further on suffer as from an insufficient
inundation, and the central authority must not only be above all suspicion
of corruption itself, it must also have strength enough to prevent each
village from defrauding its neighbours, and to compose the immemorial

1 See Description de TEgypte, torn. 17, and Appendix B, ''Egyptian Irrigation."
8 Brugsch, Hieroglyphisch-demotisches Worterbuch^ vol. vi., p. 476.

8o OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

feuds which, according to a modern traveller, arise out of such disputes.
Special probity is required for dealings in which everything depends on the
moment of performance of an act which leaves no evidence of its exact
date behind, and the unsanctioned customary morality of the ancient
Egyptians was just the quality adapted to give irrigation works their best
chance of usefulness.

Attempts have been made to account for the decline of Egypt by merely
physical causes, and it is true that both the average and the greatest height
reached by the inundation is less by some twenty feet than it was under
the Middle Monarchy. No certain explanation can be given of the fact,
but it is supposed that the breaking through of a natural rock dam in the
neighbourhood of Silsilis may have interfered with the natural storage of
the waters in what used to be their first reservoir. But the decline in the
cultivated area goes far beyond what this falling off in the inundation could
account for.

The population of ancient Egypt was estimated at 7,000,000, while the
average breadth of the Nile Valley between Cairo and Edfou is about seven
miles, about half of which was shown on the map of the French expedition
as uncultivated. Lane estimated the population in his day at two and a
half millions, and the actual produce of the soil as sufficient for the main-
tenance of 4,000,000 ; while if all the land capable of cultivation were sown,
and no food exported, twice that number might be supported l in good
years.

The encroachment of sand from the desert is no new danger, though
under the Pharaohs the towns were often built, to economize the arable
land, at the very edge of the desert. In Nubia walls were sometimes
built to keep out the sand, and trees were planted with the same object ;
and where these proved insufficient, no doubt human labour was freely
employed against the insidious, inanimate foe. But the gradual elevation
of the surface of the soil by the annual deposit from the inundation ought
to make the struggle against such encroachments increasingly easy. The
estimated rise of four inches to a century would give ten feet in three thou-
sand years, and there is no corresponding tendency in favour of the desert,
so that the falling off both in population and cultivated area must be traced
to social and political rather than geological changes.

The same sources which show us the nature of the possessions of great
men in Egypt, and their own theory as to the responsibilities of wealth,
also disclose the manner in which their estates were administered. The
tomb already described shows us one official recording the value of the
stock, and an overseer suspected of embezzlement is dragged off to give
an account of his stewardship. The processes of agriculture, cattle-breed-
ing, war, amusements and manufactures are even more fully illustrated by
the pictures in the rock tombs at Beni Hassan than in the earlier ones at
Saqqarah; but the economic order is to all appearances the same as under
the ancient monarchy. Everything is written down and numbered, the
1 The census of 1882 gave a population of 6,807,000.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 81

game killed, the measures of grain, the " hands " and tribute of the enemy,
the servants or workmen employed on the estate, and even the measures
of corn or other rations allotted to the service of the gods. In one very
ancient tomb the scribes are represented writing with a pen behind each
ear,1 and we certainly have no difficulty in believing the justice of Ani's
remark : " Whatsoever work the scribe is set to do, he will still be talking
of his writings."

The genius of the people seems to have been narrative, enumerative,
or, so to speak, arithmetical. They are content with a simple register or
record which was not, so far as we can see, used as a base for further
calculations or combinations. Legal deeds and even contracts are unilateral
in form ; the vendor says : " I have given so and so to such an one ; I have
received such a price, my heart is satisfied ; " and the negotiation is therewith
concluded ; the purchaser does not require a receipt, only a promise that
the vendor will secure him in peaceable possession against all heirs or repre-
sentatives of his own. So the steward reports what goods he has in hand,
but the employers seem to have rested content with a sort of stock-taking ;
they made no demands for a balance sheet. The Egyptians found satis-
faction in observing facts and sequences, not proportions or relations.

Hence the limits, but also the fascinating faithfulness of the monumental
record. To any age but the present, it would have been a disappointment
to find that the sacred characters, when at last deciphered, proved to be
often only an echo of the common chat of the harvest field and the work-
shop, or a childlike key to the story of the picture. What we might have
taken for a carpenter's bench represents, we learn, " the polishers polishing
the ebony bed for the eternal house ; " when captives of war are repre-
sented at work upon a temple, the overseer's warning voice reaches us :
" The stick is in my hands, be not idle ; " after a good inundation we hear
the people in the fields tell one another " the Nile was high," or that it is
" a fine year, free from want, abounding in herbs," in which " the calves
will thrive well."2

The legends too remind us of the curious displacement of the seasons
which makes the Egyptian spring-time fall, so to speak, in autumn. The
great time for the husbandman is after the inundation, when "the fields have
come out," and work can go on diligently because the great heats of
summer are past. "A fine day, it is cool and the oxen draw well, the
sky is as we wish it," observe the contented labourers, as they pause for a
moment to taste " the sweet breath of the North wind," which ranks, along
with the light of day, as the chief joy of existence to the life-loving
Egyptians. The anxious time comes later on, when the four harvest
months (March to July) are drawing to a close, and there is only time
enough to thrash and winnow the corn and carry it safely to the granaries.
Then the harvest men grumble over the labours which the year's good
fortune has brought them. "Shall we never rest from this carrying of corn
and white spelt ? The granaries are already so full that the corn comes
1 Lepsius, Denkmaler, ii. 8, c. 2 Erman, ii. p. 567.

P.C. G

82 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

out at the top, and the ships are so heavily laden with corn that they are
ready to burst, and yet we are urged to toil faster." 1 Such complaints of
the too fruitful season are evidently meant like the auctioneer's apology for
the litter of roses and the noise of nightingales ; the labourer's groans are
not intended to be taken seriously, for all the world knew that a good
harvest meant plenty for every one, a year in which even the poor man can
afford to despise the lotus bean.2

Harvesting was recognised as thirsty work, and jugs are represented as
passing from hand to hand ; while in another picture a skin, of beer or
some other beverage, is hanging from a tree, and a labourer drinks from it,
while oxen thrash the grain, men winnow it, and scribes set down the
quantities measured.3 The ears of corn only were cut off, the straw either
being allowed to stand, or left in the sheaves from which the ears were
taken. The grain, like durrah, represented in monuments of the new
Empire, was not threshed, but the grain removed with an instrument like
a comb.

Mild jokes lightened the labours of the workers, and an old man, sitting
in the shade of a sycamore tree and engaged in stripping the ears with this
tool, observes to the peasant who brings him a fresh sheaf, " If you bring
me eleven hundred and nine, I will comb them all."4 For aught we know,
the sketch may be a portrait, for the farmer's answer is : " Make haste,
and do not talk so much, thou eldest of the field workers ! " Favourite
servants we know are commemorated by name in the earliest monuments,
and even in these pictures, where to us all the subordinate figures appear
alike, it is extremely probable that the workers habitually employed in any
kind of industry felt a personal interest in the corresponding representation.
The mural picture on the great man's tomb gives exactly the same kind of
immortality to the herdsman or the. fowler and to the hereditary prince,
and thus all classes share in the present enjoyment and the prospective
advantage conferred by this most unproductive and egotistic form of ex-
penditure.

As has been already said, the marshes of the northern land were used as
general pastures as long as they continued available. Cattle farming seems
to have been more popular, in proportion, with the large proprietors of the
ancient and middle Empire than with those of later date; but it is probable
that there was no real falling off in the amount of stock in the country,
only an increase in the relative importance and area of the arable land,
which made the annual migration of the herds to the Delta a less con-
spicuous feature in rural life. In the early days it was not always easy to
get the flocks safe housed, and as the waters rose, the cattle had to swim
the channels in their way. The legend " Drive these oxen from their
pastures " accompanies a picture which needs no explanation ; but now and

1 An Eighteenth Dynasty inscription at El Kab. (Erman, ii. p. 577.) The corn was most
commonly stored in conical mounds with an opening near the top, reached by a ladder,
through which the bushels of grain were emptied.

55 Records, N.S., iii. p. 53. 3 Erman, ii. p. 575. 4 Ib. , p. 577.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 83

then there are touches of more humorous realism, as when the overseer
calls out : "What zeal, old man ! " to a labourer carrying a calf in his arms,
while the herdsman replies : " It is a suckling." Another inscription of
which it is hard to see the point, unless it refers to the original of the
accompanying portrait, tells us "This herdsman is very jovial." *

The ancient Egyptians were fond of and kind to their animals, and the
oxen were especial favourites ; they were distinguished by name, their horns
and tails were decorated, they were fed with dough from their keeper's
hands, and the herdsmen took as much pains as English scientific
farmers to improve and preserve their choicest breeds. In counting up
the herds, animals of each breed and age were reckoned separately ;
in one, not an exceptional case, the numbers reached 5,023 in all. The
drivers always have a list of the animals entrusted to them, and, consider-
ing the confidence reposed in them, it may be said that such a document
served as much for their protection as that of their employers. Fodder
was scarce, so that when a tree was felled, goats and oxen gathered round
to browse upon the leaves. As in South China, where ponies are fed on
rice, cultivated grain was the most abundant food ; but the straw of the
corn was considered the due of the oxen, as a pretty threshing song of the
Eighteenth Dynasty lets us see. " Thresh for yourselves, ye oxen," the
labourers sing, " thresh for yourselves, — for yourselves the straw for fodder,
and the grain for your lords ; take no rest, for the day is cool. Thresh for
yourselves." 2 Misery is cruel ; these friendly ditties were certainly not sung
by a down-trodden, slave-driven peasantry.

The Egyptians did not keep or breed poultry, at least till a late period ;
they contented themselves with netting wild fowl, and fattening, or stuffing
them after their capture. Hunting, fowling, and fishing were favourite
amusements with the wealthy, especially under the Ancient and Middle
monarchy ; and the marshes and watercourses where such sports could
be enjoyed, served as natural game preserves, which were probably also
very fairly profitable as contributing to the general food supply.

§ 4. ADMINISTRATION THROUGH STEWARDS.

The larger Egyptian landowners did not sublet, but administered their
property through stewards or scribes, the surplus produce remaining in the
hands of the scribes to be employed by them as directed. Ani takes for
granted that the private householder will have a khenmes, a steward, or
agent, but he is advised to have only one, a judicious and truthful person,
and himself to observe his conduct : " Let thy justice prevail against his
weights and his additions." The steward is apparently sometimes a re-
lation, an uncle, sometimes an overseer or "governor" in the slang sense
of the workshop. Such a person must be employed, but looked after ; his
interests should be cared for by his employer, and we may conjecture,

1 Erman, id., p. 583.

2 Diimichen ap. Werner, Nile Sketches, p. 52. Erman, ib., p. 516.

84 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

though the sense of the texts on this subject is obscure, that one reason why
the duty of providing for the steward is mentioned is that, if provided for,
he will have the less temptation to oppress his subordinates. The general
sense of the advice is to recommend moderation on all sides in the re-
lationship, and it is of course psychologically certain that the steward, who
treated his master's interests as his own, would also be the most likely to
treat his master's servants as a just and scrupulous master would treat
them himself, and wish to have them treated by others.

The king himself was served in the same way as private persons and the
great landowners, from whom he differed only in the comprehensiveness of
his sway, which included their ration-eaters as well as his own. The great
inscription of Amen, the governor " of all the works of the palace of the
king" (Usurtasen I., Twelfth Dynasty), dwells especially upon his exercise of
these virtues of a steward upon the largest scale. Among other offices, he
had charge of all the herds belonging to the temples of the Nome of Mah,
and he bequeaths to posterity the assurance, " I carried all the produce
of the milch cows to the palace, nothing was kept back by me." Amen,
though acting as a steward towards the property of the king or the temples,
is himself a ruler and, as he is careful to tell us, a prince of a gentle
character, who loved his town. " I never/' he protests, " I never afflicted
the child of the poor ; I have not ill-treated the widow. I never disturbed
any owner of land ; I never drove away the herdsman. I never took his
men away for my works from the five hand master.1 I ploughed all the
fields of the district. ... I found food for its inhabitants, and gave
them the food which they produced . . . when the inundations of
the Nile were great, he who sowed was master of his crop. I kept back
nothing for myself from the revenues of the field."

As it has been doubted whether there was, strictly speaking, any private
ownership of land in Egypt, it is worth noticing that this inscription takes
for granted the existence of cultivating owners who might be disturbed or
fleeced by an unscrupulous governor ; which could hardly be the case if all
the land belonged to the king, the priesthood, or the military class, and
the less so, since every officer of the king must have belonged to one or
other of these two classes. The king in whose service Amen was
employed is the one to whom the "Instructions" of Amenemhat I. were
addressed, a short composition ranking next to the Prisse papyrus in interest,,
and regarded in later dynasties as a model of style as well as morality.

The king warns the son who is to be associated with him in the govern-
ment to let concord be kept between his subjects and himself, "lest
people should give their hearts up to fear ; " he is not to isolate himself,
not to "let the landed lords and noblemen (only) fill his heart like
brothers." Then, quoting his own example, the king is heard making just
the same protests as his righteous servants : " I have made the affliction of
the afflicted to cease, so that their cries are heard no more : . . . I

1 The "master," or "foreman of five." (Brugsch, History, i. 135-7.) Cf. Meyer,
Geschichte, p. 160 ; Newberry, Beni Hasan, i. pp. 26, 7.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 85

never wore a heart careless for what was for my servants. None were
made hungry, none were made thirsty through me. . . . What I
ordered was place for friendship." l Even without this classic utterance
we should have felt justified in assuming that the best Egyptian kings
must have made it their business to secure servants who could praise
themselves without too flagrant outrage on the sanctity of truth. But the
national habit of looking at only one thing at a time makes the existence
of this second hand feeling of responsibility almost entirely a matter of
inference. Each speaker tells us of his own deeds and his own merits, and
has no thoughts to spare for those of other people, however intimately con-
nected with him. One or two of the precepts laid down by the scribe Ani,
together with the Instructions of Amenemhat, stand almost alone as bearing
on the way in which the system of delegated authority ought to be worked.

The method of administration through stewards or scribes seems to
have been carried through all grades of rank and wealth. An officer of
the palace writes to the scribe who is in charge of his own household to ask
why provisions have not been sent to the palace : " It is the season for
calves, beasts, eggs, ducks, and vegetables. . . . "If there are ao oxen
in the stall of the house of Pharaoh which is under my keeping, thou
shalt seek out four oxen of the best and biggest from among my cattle
which are in thy keeping." 2 As however the steward kept the account
against himself, and was not likely to have his record challenged, unless it
were in the long run suspiciously unfavourable to his employer, we are
not to conclude that these four oxen are supplied at his own expense,
only that in the debtor and creditor account between the two the balance
may for the moment have been in favour of the palace.

The custom of, as it were, boarding out the live stock amongst servants
or dependants is not by any means peculiar to Egypt ; but where it was
most developed, as in Tatary and Ireland, it ceased to be regarded as an
incident of simple stewardship, and the dependant was called upon to
undertake the charge at his own risk. Instead of simply accounting for
the stock in his keeping, he was expected to pay a profit rent for their use,
and to bear the loss if from any cause the actual produce and increase
failed to recompense him for the rent and charges. In stock-farming, as
in agriculture, the ancient Egyptians seem to have acquiesced instinctively
in the idea that the loss of property, due to exceptional accidents, should
be borne entirely by the privileged classes, which received, equally as a
matter of course, the surplus of wealth provided by favourable seasons.

The same system continued under the Ptolemies, and we find a man
writing to a woman to give evidence in his favour in a transaction
regarding another woman, who had taken out of his stable (presumably in
payment of a debt) a she-ass belonging to the king, which he summons
her to restore in exchange for one of his own oxen. Similarly, a labourer

1 Records, ii. 9. Amelineau, Recueil de Travaux, x. p. 97 ff. , renders the first and last
of these phrases : "Be not urged by thy subjects ; " "I was obeyed, and I gave perfect
orders. "

2 Hieratic Papyri, by C. W. Goodwin. Cambridge Essays, 1858, p. 248.

86 OWNERSHIP JN EGYPT.

in the reign of Artaxerxes pledges himself to deliver a black cow of his
master's, or failing that, an ox of his own to a choachyte for a funeral
sacrifice, or to give four times the value of the animal in money 1 — a penalty
which, like all Egyptian fines by contract, is only intended to ensure the ful-
filment of the bargain. In all such cases it is probable that the animal
claimed represented the balance of a debt really due for value received
by the subordinate, not a mere exaction on the part of the lord. The
stewards were no more required to make good, at their own expense, the
loss to their masters from, let us say, a murrain among the cattle in their
charge, than plantation slaves would be to make good losses arising from a
fall in the price of cotton.

On the other hand, when the services of an animal, belonging to a
superior, were to be set against the cost and trouble of its maintenance, —
the cuietakers being required only to furnish a limited amount of work in
the year as rent, — it sometimes happened that some intermediate official
would obtain possession of the desired animal (ass or ox as the case might
be), while the demand for so many days' work of the ass was made
punctually to the labourer who should have obtained it, but did not.
However, "there were judges at Thebes," and we may hope from the
survival of \ws> plaidoyer that the particular Thothmes, whose grievance was
of this kind, got back the use of his ass at last.

The " Story of the Peasant, :> in the Berlin papyrus,8 reads like a popular
Egyptian counterpart to such modern legends as the Miller of Sans Souri,
and it gives a further illustration of the kind of injustice to which the
ancient fellahin were liable. One of the dwellers in the marshlands, who
were supposed to be a particularly rough and simple race, was driving a
laden ass to his own village ; this excites the covetousness of the servant of
a chief steward of the king. The peasant's road passes close to his house,
and is very narrow ; so Asaris has linen artfully spread out in the middle
of the pathway. While the peasant is going up the bank to avoid the
linen, his ass eats the corn at the side of the cultivated enclosure, and is
then claimed as forfeit, because of the trespass. The story was popular
and ancient ; two of the surviving versions of it being ascribed to the
Twelfth Dynasty, and in this case too we may safely assume that the poor
man got his rights at last.

It is significant to find that such stories as are told now of Beys and
Pashas were told in ancient Egypt of the servants of subordinate officials.
Still a system of agencies so easily liable to abuse could only have been
maintained when the general sense of the proprieties was strong enough
to supply the place of the checks and guarantees which Western civili-
zation delights in multiplying. The security of the poor lay in the fact
that the rich were satisfied with revenues that could be drawn without
oppression, so that oppression in the private interest of employees was a
gratuitous unpleasantness.

1 Les obligations en droit Egyptien. E. Revillout, p. 219.

2 See ante, p. 58.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 87

The outline of the political constitution seems to repeat itself in the
industrial world. Every guarantee for the maintenance of good govern-
ment is wanting, and yet order is maintained ; the law gives no security
against oppression, yet public justice is upheld; and if equity reigns equally
in private transactions, this is in spite of the same freedom from outward
checks, since a man's oath is taken as evidence in support of his own
claims, while the law seems to have prescribed no penalties for a mere
breach of contract, leaving it rather to the parties themselves to assess
their own damages and to stipulate in the contract that these should be
paid,, failing specific performance. The law courts did not aim at giving
civil redress to citizens who were defrauded by evil doers ; only, as the
person justly accused of theft or fraud could be justly punished by the
tribunals, those who did not desire to " eat stick " found it expedient
not to cheat enough to provpke any one else to cite them before the
tribunal.

There was nothing but the stable inclination of the wealthy proprietors
to "let well alone" to restrain them from exactions. The one-sidedness
of the system did not habitually lead to abuses, only because the custom
of the country was stronger than the bad propensities of any individual,
and by custom a certain modicum of good behaviour was exacted from all
holding a position of authority. Dishonest or tyrannical stewards were
not numerous, greedy, or irresponsible enough to reduce bribery to a
system, or to enlist the whole force of the administrative machine upon
the side of the oppressors. No class was able to grow up with interests
opposed to those of the community. Great as was the authority or in-
fluence of the scribes, the fact that it was exercised neither in their own
name nor in their own interest prevented them from obtaining social or
political predominance. Like the modern Brahmins, they were a serving
not a ruling class. It is one of themselves who includes amongst the
councils of worldly wisdom : "What the master says, let it be as he says
it;" and we have seen that it was included among the duties of a master to
control the accounts of his most confidential agents. The extreme sim-
plicity of the social order was its protection. When there is only the one
simple relation of two servants to a common master, nothing but a balance
of good-will is needed to enable the just master to prefer just servants to
his posts of trust, and to dismiss those who are found unworthy. It is only
with the immense complexity of modern life that the difficulty arises some-
times, not merely of doing justice, but of deciding what it would be just
to do, when the interests of the innocent and the guilty have become
almost inextricably interwoven.

In Egypt, as in China, the holders of office were liable to be judged by
the result of their administration, and the utterance of the vox populi was
taken as conclusive. When the cultivators of a royal farm have fled from
the oppressions of a certain overseer, the scribe reports that he has had
the man punished, but meanwhile the lord's lands are left without any one
to till them ; and this fact constitutes at once the proof and the substance

88 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

of the overseer's offence.1 A proverb of Ani's, evidently addressed to an
unpopular and unworthy official, shows that the king's servants were ex-
posed to the same sort of plebiscitary judgment : " You arrive at a town
amidst acclamations ; you leave it, and only escape by the strength of your
arms ; " 2 and there can be little doubt that in ancient Egypt, as in modern
China, such a verdict was fatal to an official career.

Other evidence goes to show that the normal condition of the labouring
class was so far favourable that they were able to offer successful resistance
to particular instances of oppression. The groundwork of the Egyptian
economy, as has been said, was the allotment to the labourers of subsistence
wages paid in kind. The cultivators of course retained a portion of the
produce of the soil for their own maintenance, and village artisans probably
supplied their wants by barter, but workmen in the employment of the
temples received, like the priests and scribes, though with diminishing
punctuality, monthly rations upon a scale supposed to be sufficient for the
support of themselves and their families ; and this mode of payment, which
was certainly followed in the Necropolis of Thebes — the largest employer
of labour in the whole country — probably extended to all minor establish-
ments with a similarly organized staff of operatives following a variety of
trades.

In the twenty-ninth year of Rameses III., there was a serious strike in
the Necropolis, owing to the distribution of these rations having fallen into
arrears. After having been left for eighteen days without supplies, the
labourers assembled themselves, and passing out of the walled enclosure
of the city of tombs, betook themselves to the open ground behind the
temple of Thothmes III., and the next day they actually penetrated within
the precincts of the temple of Rameses II. The priests of this temple,
together with the scribes and overseers of the Necropolis, vainly tried to
pacify them with words ; they declared themselves to be perishing with
hunger and thirst ; they lacked clothes, firing, fish, grain, and all the com-
monest necessaries. They demanded that the governor of the Necropolis,
or Pharaoh himself, should be appealed to on their behalf, and only con-
sented to return to their quarters when the rations for the past month were
at length provided.

The complaints seem to have been repeated every other month through
the season ; when two sacks of spelt were offered them instead, of the
normal allowance of fifty, they threatened to help themselves from the
granary by the waterside ; and it was only after another demonstration be-
yond the walls, and the intervention of the governor of the town, that they
at last received their due.3 As we have other reason to know, the gover-
nors of the town and of the West of Thebes were not always on the best

1 Chabas, Melanges, 3me Serie, p. 146.

2 A passage in the Book of the Dead (Pierret, 127, 12} sounds like a formula for the
history of a virtuous officer. " May my soul rejoin Osiris. . . . May I enter praised
and depart beloved."

3 Chabas ap. Lieblein, Deux pap. hier. du Musee de Turin, 1868. Melange?
Egyptologiques, iii., 45.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 89

of terms ;T but the civil authority was clearly concerned when the discon-
tent had reached such threatening dimensions, and when the workmen
had not merely appealed to Pharaoh, but their superiors had sworn by his
name to give them redress.

It is curious that this difficulty should have arisen in the reign of the
king whose lavish benefactions to the gods seem to have paved the way for
political as well as social revolution. There is nothing in all the records
of the Ancient or the Middle Empire indicative of a similar failure of the
food supply. The only granary which seems to have been empty was the
one out of which the workmen's rations should have been drawn ; there
is no allusion to a general scarcity to explain or excuse the disregard of
their wants, and we are therefore tempted to conjecture that the sudden
increase of the wealth under the charge of the temple officers gave a
sudden impetus to corrupt practices which overshot the mark ; and in spite
of the king's liberality, left less than the ordinary revenues available for
those employed in the industries dependent on the tombs and temples.

A similar incident occurred in the same quarter in the reign of Rameses
IX. We gather from the foreman, whose time-book has been already
quoted, that his troop, which included mechanics of different kinds, metal-
workers, cabinet-makers, etc., received a weekly ration of about five
hundred pounds of fish, besides vegetables, corn, firewood, and jars of
beer or oil in proportion. But as before, the distribution of the rations
was allowed to fall in arrear for a whole month ; in one month wood alone
was given out, and as the workmen had already tried the expedient of
striking work without permanent success, they proceeded the next day into
the city, and made their appeal to the great lords and the first prophet of
Amon. These high authorities at once summoned the responsible scribe,
and, in the words of our text, said to him : " See here the- corn of the
Government; give thence rations of corn to the people of the Necropolis."
The last words of the worthy foreman's record also deserve to be preserved
at length : " This day they gave us the rations of corn ; we gave two coffers
and a writing table to the fan-bearer" 2

We may be wrong in imagining that this kind of grievance was of recent
origin, but there can be no doubt as to the fact that even in the latter days
of the monarchy, when the beginning of the end of Egypt's glory was in
sight, the people still looked to their lawful rulers for protection, and did
not look in vain. The sovereign power was conceived as a friend, with no
defect save that of being, like the gods themselves, somewhat far away
from its suppliant ; and the people had not formed such a habit of submit-
ting to oppression as to make them unable to assert their lawful claims.

There was a well-established standard of comfort amongst the labourers,
and unless the rations supplied to them came up to this, they could be
depended on to grumble. A letter from a scribe to his master narrates
how all the rural economy is prospering; men and beasts have their
rations duly, and of the former he says further that " none complain
1 See post, p. 165. 2 Erman, sEg., p. 183.

90 OWNERSHIP JN EGYPT.

concerning the food and drink." l If their just complaints were not
attended to, the labourers, as we have seen, went a step further and
struck work, or, as the scribe expresses it, " lay in their houses " ; and as
strikes are seldom carried to a successful end, except in tolerably flourish-
ing trades, we must conclude that the Egyptian working classes of the
period were several degrees removed from the helplessness of chronic
destitution.

SLAVERY.

One point which cannot be overlooked in considering the position of
the industrial population is the extent to which it may have been affected
by the development of slavery. The statement in an inscription of the
Twelfth Dynasty, that the speaker "gave his orders to the land of the
South, and imposed the taxes on the Northern land," recalls a significant
phrase in the Ritual of the Dead, which probably represents the mental
habit of centuries. " I have led to thee the South, subdued for thee the
North," — the soul, in the character of Horns, is supposed to say to Osiris,
as if it belonged to the eternal nature of things for the negroes to be
carried captive or reduced to vassalage, while the Asiatics were invaded
and made tributary. The prevalence of negro slavery is also evidenced
by proverbs. " Jt is said of the ass, urge him, and he is active for the
day; of the negro, threaten him, and he will carry his load."

Diodorus' statement that " Sesoosis employed no native Egyptians on
his works, but caused all the labour to be done by his captives," though
of no historical value, serves to show what was the ideal of Egyptians of
his own day. Indeed, it is possible that the forced labour of newly sub-
jected foreigners was regarded rather as a kind of tax or corvee than as a
form of personal servitude. The Temple of Amon, at Ape, near Karnak,
was built for Thothmes III. by "the prisoners which have been carried
away as living prisoners in very great numbers." Rameses III. allotted his
captives to the service of temples, and it is generally admitted that a con-
siderable part of the forced labour expended upon public works was
executed under the greatest kings by their prisoners of war.

The Syrian colonies left behind after the expulsion of the Shepherd
kings were treated in this respect as captives, but the same legend which
tells of the seventy of their taskmasters also bears witness to the fact that
even enslaved foreigners were well fed by their Egyptian lords. Express
mention is made, as of something exceptionally disastrous, of the loss of
life among the labourers dispatched on one expedition, which reached ten
per cent, of the whole number employed,2 and tried by Oriental standards
such a maximum mortality may even pass for moderate, while the fact
that it is recorded as a matter of regret shows that the Government did
not claim the right to dispose irresponsibly of the lives of the people.

Of course only men prisoners are represented as employed in building

1 Letters from the scribe Pentaur, Cambridge Essays, loc. cit. 2 Brugsch, Hist., ii. 170.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 91

temples or monuments ; and the campaigns of the Egyptians were not
always directed against regular armies, fighting at a distance from home.
When they met their enemies on their own ground, they must either have
been content with levying a tribute, or they must have carried off women
and children as well. The latter course was probably the exception, but
any mixed array of captives would be disposed of in the way described by
the pseudo Aristseus, the details of whose fictions were of course founded
upon contemporary facts. According to him the Jewish captives, who
were released out of compliment to the authors of the Septuagint, had
been partly drafted into the army, and partly settled in colonies for labour,
while the old, the young, and the women were given away as household
slaves to individuals, or for camp service.1

Household slaves were also obtainable by purchase, but it is character-
istic of Egyptian moderation that in a community where slaves were freely
made and used, the numbers or discontent of the slave population never
either caused inconvenience or threatened danger. The absence of the
argumentative, almost of the logical instinct in the Egyptian mind seems
to have saved it from one of the commonest fallacies of practical politi-
cians— the assumption, namely, that what has been found useful up to a
certain point will be twice as useful if carried as far again — a doctrine
which, unfortunately, only holds good of the most disinterested social
virtue. Even if every other ingredient of stability had still been present,
it is self-evident that the duration of Egyptian or Chinese society would
have become impossible in the face of a growing population of malcontent
slaves. But there was no fear of such a class in Egypt, where, in the first
place, only members of an inferior race ran any risk of being reduced to
slavery at all, and where, moreover, the lot of the domestic slave was in no
respect worse than that of the labourer or artisan accustomed to do his
daily work "under the stick" of an overlooker.

Domestic slavery has certainly never existed in a milder form than in
Egypt. The family relations of slaves were always recognised, and, in
private deeds regarding them, the father and mother of the slave are men-
tioned in the same way as those of any native Egyptian. A slave is sold
with his family and his possessions, a sign that it is usual for him to have
both ; and in one case, when sold for the second time after a few months'
interval, the slave himself signs an agreement to the transfer, and consents
to accept the new master.

M. Revillout suggests that the slave may have been entitled by law to
claim his freedom if sold repeatedly without his own consent ; ,and the
document in which it is given serves, in lieu of the customary stipulation,
for the payment of a fine or penalty, in the event of the assignment being
called in question at any future time. There is nothing to indicate that
the document was of an exceptional character in Egypt, but it would be
impossible to find a parallel for it elsewhere. The terms are as follows :
" The young man above named, Pseu . . . son of Thothmes, whose
1 Galland, Bill. max. Patrum., ii. 774, C. D.

92 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

mother is Settekbau, says : I have written to accomplish all the above
words. My heart is satisfied ; I am thy servant together with my children
and all our property, present and to come. I can never make any op-
position hereafter to this servitude." 1

It is difficult to say whether by the latter clause the slave would be
held to have renounced his constitutional right of taking sanctuary.
Herodotus 2 mentions a certain temple where if slaves took refuge they
were allowed to pass into the possession of the god, and the surviving
documents show that this was not an exceptional privilege. The slave
who found his employer intolerably troublesome and disagreeable, without
necessarily alleging any gross outrage, could throw himself as a suppliant
before some divine image and was secure against anything worse than
reproaches from his deserted master. If, on the other hand, the master
had a grievance, he proceeded in the public courts against the slave, instead
of passing judgment and executing sentence at his own discretion. A
slave who had taken sanctuary in a temple might be arrested by the police
outside it ; and thus rewards, offered for the arrest of missing slaves, some-
times add a promise of half the amount for information where they have
taken sanctuary.

The text of the document in which a slave renounces his master is as
remarkable as that by which the son of Thothmes assents to his own sale.
" My voice, that of the servant of Tave, before Osorapis, son of Taba.
Oh thou, whose name is written above, great Lord, whose face is protec-
tion, I have cried towards thee ; I shall betake myself from these people.
Thou hast heard my voice, my struggles, and that which has befallen ;
thou knowest the heart of thy little servant ; thou wilt make known the
perversity of these people vast as the sea ! On my head the difficulty
which results ; my whole being revolts against their service and their
company ! Come ! there is a step — I will take it ; there are reproaches —
I will bear them ; there is a God ! an image of the God ! I fly towards it ;
I will entreat them (the Gods). Let Tave know whom his servant will
entreat ! " 3 The Serapeum at Memphis was the sanctuary invoked in
this case, and, as may be supposed, the lot of the numerous slaves, belong-
ing to the temples of such benignant gods, was sufficiently easy ; even
their interment was so liberally provided for, that the right of conducting
it was a property worth defending in legal form.

There is another curious type of deed, by which a woman sells herself
for life, as a servant or concubine, expressly stipulating that she is not to
be repudiated at any future time by her master, nor the bargain disputed
by any friend or relative on her behalf, under penalty of a fine equivalent
to the value of all the personal property which she transfers along with her
own person to her future lord.4 The rights of the slave wife among the
Hebrews were probably copied from Egyptian usage, and the transaction
should perhaps be regarded rather as illustrating an inferior kind of marri-

1 Cours de droit Egyptien, p. 103. 2 ii. 113.

3 Zeitschrift, iii. p. 125. 4 Cours de droit Egyptien, p. 102.

THE ECONOMIC ORDER. 93

age than voluntary slavery. As in China, the children of such a marriage
would follow their father's, not their mother's status, and have a claim on
his inheritance as much as if their mother had been a legitimate or " estab-
lished " wife.

In general the position of the Egyptian slave was not unlike that of the
Roman freedman, a word which the Egyptians were as little able to trans-
late as the Jews, whose liberal treatment of domestic slaves shows some
trace of Egyptian influence. Slaves not employed in household service
lived at large, and had so little to distinguish them from other cultivators
that we find a private landowner complaining that one of his slaves had
been "pressed" and carried off to serve in the navy.1 Compensation was
claimed for the loss of his services, and it was urged that he should be
restored in time to attend to the summer's harvest work. Free cultivators
at the same time were glad to borrow the slave's right of sanctuary, if op-
pressed by landlords, stewards, or money-lenders, for in some quite late
leases (of the time of Euergetes II.) the tenant is made to bind himself
by oath not to betake himself as a suppliant to the temple, altar, or statue
of any god. Oppression was not unknown in ancient Egypt, but there,
as in other States of the domestic type, the constitution of the State aimed
at providing the poorest with a refuge against it. With the rise of the
political races the new idea presents itself, of inviting the poor man, whom
it may hereafter be convenient to oppress, to contract himself — of course
quite freely — out of his constitutional right to be protected against oppres-
sion by those higher powers, with whom justice, it was hoped, abode in
heaven, even when no longer to be seen on earth.

1 Chabas, Melanges Egyptologiqnes, p. 226. T.S.B.A., vii. 3, 411.

CHAPTER III.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY.
§ i. DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN TRAFFIC.

IN ancient Egypt agriculture counted for more than manufactures, and
manufactures were of more importance than commerce. The trade which
existed was brisk enough as far as it went, but it aimed at little more than
the satisfaction of local wants by the more or less direct exchange of com-
modities between producers.

The limited development of internal traffic was due to two principal
causes : the natural products of different parts of the country were too
much alike for much intercourse to be necessary for purposes of exchange,
and the conformation of the country, in itself scarcely larger than Belgium,
was such as to give the longest possible distance from north to south ; and
though, of course, the Nile made communication possible even from the
extremity of Southern Nubia to the Delta, the mass of the population found
the distances a bar to voluntary intercourse. Thebes and Memphis even,
to say nothing of Pelusium and Syene, are about as far apart as Berwick
and the Land's End.

The Nile was the only known highway, so much so that the language
scarcely possessed a general word for travelling; going southward was called
"going up stream," and a journey to the north, even by land into the desert,
was described by a term meaning to sail with the current. In the absence
of tributary streams, the direction of the Nile appeared to the Egyptians as
something belonging to the nature of rivers,1 so that when they made the
acquaintance of the Euphrates, they described it as "the river of Naharina
which flows backwards," — the water upon which you travel northward when
ascending the stream.

While internal traffic was thus brought to a minimum by natural causes,
foreign commerce can scarcely be said to have existed, before the estab-
lishment of peaceable intercourse with Syria under the new empire. The
importation of merchandize from foreign countries was a political rather
than a commercial affair. Such foreign wares as entered the country came
as tribute, as the spoil of war, or as memorials of peaceful embassies.
Like the emperors of China and the petty kings of modern Africa, the
kings of Egypt would have considered it beneath their dignity to buy or
sell. It was a political concession, rather than a commercial treaty, in the
modern sense, when Rameses II. allowed the Khita (or Hittites) to im-
port food from Egypt, " to preserve the life of the people of the Khita."
1 Erman, vol. ii. pp. 635, 680.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY. 95

There is no reason to suppose that such transactions were ever regarded
as a possible source of revenue, and in the ordinary course of things the
native Pharaohs, instead of exporting, hoarded the surplus food supply?
from which, in bad times, they were enabled, without perceptible sacrifice,
to provide food for their necessitous subjects. The mineral wealth of the
country was treated, in the same way, as a State possession, and Govern-
ment expeditions were sent to bring in gold, copper, or turquoises from the
mines of Nubia and Sinai, just as they were sent to the quarries of Ham-
mamat or Syene to bring home the choicest stone or marble for the royal
monuments. The copper mines in the Wadi Maghara, where the figure of
King Senoferu is still to be seen upon the rocks, were no doubt the first
to be utilized in this way. The neighbourhood of barbarous and hostile
tribes, and the distance of the mines from the Nile, where alone the busi-
ness of transport became easy, made it necessary for every expedition to
take a semi-military character. As the mines of Sinai were reached by sea,
vessels had to be manned, if not built, for each party, and the large propor-
tion borne by the number of guards, to the workmen mentioned in some
of the expeditions, show that the latter must have been employed also in
the transport of food and water for the whole body.

In the ancient kingdom silver was less plentiful than gold, of which the
chief supply was derived from the regions known as "the Arabian desert "
or " the East," a term used vaguely, much as Europeans used to speak of
the Levant. The quarries of Hammamat, in the mountains between the
Nile and the Red Sea on the road from Koptos to Kosseir, were worked
in the reign of Assa of the Fifth Dynasty, and Pepi of the Sixth, high officers
being sent to inspect the proceedings of the miners ; but in the time of
confusion between the Sixth and the Eleventh Dynasties they may have
been disused until the road was opened again, for official embassies to
the land of Punt. The gold mines of Nubia were among the attractions
which drew the great kings of the Twelfth Dynasty to attempt the conquest
of that country ; but while they desired to secure peaceable access to
the mines, and also to obtain the ivory, ostrich feathers, leopard skins,
and gold dust brought to market by the negroes, nothing was further
from their intention than to permit free and open trade between their own
subjects and the barbarians.

Ethiopia was the Mongolia of Egypt, and just as the "Jade gate" of
China was garrisoned to enable the Government strictly to limit and con-
trol the traffic with the Tatars, so Usurtasen III. fortified the " gates of
the barbarians," establishing a station at Semneh, south of the Second
Cataract, with two forts commanding the canals, a temple, and a border
stele, bearing an inscription that forbade negroes to cross the boundary, save
such as brought cattle or other goods for sale upon the spot. The names
of Elephantine and Syene, signifying respectively "ivory" and "trade,"
show sufficiently the purpose of the first frontier stations. The negroes
were forbidden to pass either by land or water, and Usurtasen solemnly
committed the care of the boundary to his sons, declaring those of his

96 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

successors who defended it to be like Horus, the son who protected his
father.1

All these precautions did not prevent the raids of the barbarians from
being renewed, and though one of the Sebek-hoteps of the Thirteenth
Dynasty penetrated over 300 miles to the south of Egypt, Nubia was lost
under the Hyksos, and the former limits not regained till the reign of
Thothmes III., whose successors seem to have been mainly prompted by
their desire for gold, in keeping up the diplomatic correspondence with
Kassite kings of Babylon. One cause of the importance of the station at
Semneh was that the rise of the Nile could be watched there. But the
only other vulnerable spot on the natural frontier was defended in exactly
the same way ; " the wall of the Lord erected to keep off the Asiatics "
barred the Wadi Tumilat, to the east of the Delta, where the Bedouin
tribes were as dangerous as negroes to the peaceable Egyptians.

One of the most characteristic points about the mining expeditions of
the kings, is that nearly all of their commanders think it necessary to give
a report of their success in provisioning the caravans, or rather the small
armies, employed upon the trying marches through waterless deserts and
mountains. One of the Mentu-hoteps of the Eleventh Dynasty made a
reservoir or discovered a spring for the workmen in Hammamat, "that
they might not perish with thirst ; ;' and the inscription commemorating
the expedition which followed this fortunate and beneficent work tells us
"that the soldiers suffered no loss, no man perished, no ass had his back
broken, no labourer succumbed." 2

A little later Se-anch-ka-ra,3 a precursor of the great Twelfth Dynasty,
sent an expedition of 3,000 men to the land of Punt, the commissariat of
which had been so well provided for, that twenty loaves and two jars of
water were given daily to each man in the company. The adequacy of this
provision may be measured by a comparison with the " temple days " of
the priests,4 whose rations for a family of the higher class are reckoned at
one hundred loaves a day ; the twenty given to the men of the expedition
probably represent food for themselves, and for a woman or other attend-
ant to cook and carry for them.

If the loss of life in any similar embassy was considerable, the fact is
recorded with regret, and it is clear that the Egyptian kings did not merely
aim at providing such a supply of water as should make it possible for the
gold mines to be worked ; they were honestly anxious to have them
worked without loss of life.5 Amen mentions as part of his success in
bringing gold from Nubia to Usurtasen I., that not one of the 400 men
who formed his party had been lost on the road. Seti I. dug wells for the

1 Lepsius, Nubische Grammatik, p. 88.

2 Wiedemann, ^Egyptische Geschichte, p. 21. Cf. also Brugsch, Die dltesten Goldberg-
u-erke, Westermanns, lllustrirte Deutsche Monatsheft., Sep., 1890, p. 747.

3 Erman, ii. p. 668. 4 See/wv", p. 158.

5 Diodorus describes the sufferings of prisoners employed in the gold mines as intoler-
ably severe ; but there are two points to be remembered in regard to his statement : first,
that it only refers to the decadence of Egypt ; and, secondly, that a cruel penal system
may co-exist, as in China, with a generally high regard for popular rights.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY. 97

miners, and built a town and temple for them near the modern Redesieh,
and he tried, vainly, to obtain water by the rich mines of Eschuranib, so
that " on account of the dearth of water, gold had ceased to be brought
from the land," till, as appears from the Kuban stele,1 Rameses II. was
more successful. When we compare these records with the reckless waste
of life among the labourers employed on his works by Mehemet Ali, or
even those engaged upon the Suez Canal, the scrupulous humanity of the
ancient rulers of the country seems all the more remarkable.

The repeated embassies to the land of Punt were chiefly designed to
bring back rare plants and animals, spice and incense, and especially the
trees from which incense was obtained ; and as all presents to a king are
regarded in the light of homage, the treasures so obtained were called
tribute,2 though no attempt was made to claim or exercise authority over
Southern Arabia. Under the Second and Third Rameses,3 ships were
used " to bring in the tribute of many lands," and it is probable that the
trade with Syria, which then began to attain considerable dimensions, was
conducted, as foreign trade with China always was, until the present cen-
tury, under cover of parties of so-called tribute bearers. The articles
imported at this time can be recognised by their names, and include arms,
chariots, boats, musical instruments, different kinds of bread and bever-
ages, incense, horses, cattle, rish, and various other manufactured wares ; 4
and as Egypt cannot have been inferior to Syria in any of the industrial
arts, fashion and the commercial enterprise of their neighbours may
account for the extent of the importations. But so long as these continued
few and valuable, it was taken for granted that they must belong to the
king alone, and in fact they were for the most part such as could only be
used by the privileged few : the king, his officers, and the guardians of
temple endowments.

The list of the spoil taken by Thothmes III. 5 gives a tolerably exhaus-
tive account of the treasures of the time. It includes, of course, bulls,
cows, kids, white goats, mares, foals, oxen, geese, and corn ; then follow
strange birds, negroes, men and maid-servants, noble prisoners and the
children of defeated kings, chariots of copper, plated with gold and silver,
iron armour, bows, swords and other accoutrements, leather collars orna-
mented with brass, gold and silver rings, cups, dishes and other utensils,
vessels of iron and copper, statues with heads of gold, ell-measures with
heads of ivory, ebony, and cedar inlaid with gold, chairs, tables and foot-
stools of cedar wood and ivory, a plough inlaid with gold, blocks of blue-

1 Erman, ii. p. 616.

2 The famous embassy of Syrians (Amu), represented on the grave of Khnumhotep at
Beni Hassan, bears paint for the eyes as a precious gift, and one of the royal scribes
presents their petition for leave to pass the frontier ; and the tomb of Rekhmara shows
him receiving, for his sovereign, gift-bearing embassies from Punt, from the princes of
Phoenicia and the isles that are in the midst of the sea, from Ethiopians or Nubians,
from Syrians, and from the tribes of the Upper Nile.

3 The great vessels of Rameses III., according to the Harris papyrus, go to Punt to
load, with all the produce of To-neter — Arabia, and the East generally, as well as with
the mysterious marvels of the land of Punt.

4 Erman, ii. p. 682. s Brugsch, Hist., i. 326.

P.C. H

98 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

stone, greenstone and lead, " a golden storm-cap inlaid with bluestone,"
jars of balsam, oil, wine and honey, various kinds of precious woods,
incense, alabaster, precious stones and colours, iron columns for a tent with
precious stones in them, bricks of pure brass, elephants' tusks, natron, and,
finally, by way of curiosity, from the land of the kings of Ruthen, three
battle axes of flint — an item which is perhaps more interesting to us than
to the original captors, as a mark of the duration of the stone age in Syria.1
Under the Ancient Empire, both hyaenas and gazelles were included among
domestic live stock, and if we add to the above list all the ordinary pro-
ducts of the Nile Valley and its dexterous artificers, we shall have a toler-
ably complete idea of the commodities counted as wealth in the golden
age of Egyptian greatness and prosperity.

The Ebers papyrus, composed about the middle of the sixteenth century
B.C., contains prescriptions for the eyes, said to have been obtained from
an Amu of Kepir, which Meyer supposes to have been the Phoenician
Byblos. The trade in fish, fancy bread, and such ordinary articles of con-
sumption, which was common in the later years of the Egyptian monarchy,
probably began during, and continued after, the Egyptian conquests in
Syria in the same century. But it is impossible as yet to say how early
the exchange of goods between Egypt, Phoenicia, and Babylonia may have
begun. Some pottery found in tombs of the Twelfth and Thirteenth
Dynasties resembles the earliest Cypriote and Italian ware,2 and Meyer
supposes 3 that Egyptian wares reached Babylonia through traders at the
same period. Both the Phoenician alphabet and the Cypriote syllabary
also appear to be derived from the hieratic character used in the Twelfth,
rather than that of the Eighteenth or any later Dynasty.^ Indeed, unless
the alphabetic development which started from Egypt had taken place
already, the use of the Babylonian language and character for diplomatic
correspondence in the sixteenth century might have arrested or super-
seded it.

Though there was little commerce in ancient Egypt, there was a great
deal of local trade ; a brisk exchange of commodities, by way of barter,
went on between the petty producers of the same village or neighbourhood.
There is a representation of an Egyptian market on the pillars of a Fifth
Dynasty tomb,5 which shows that the work-people who, from some points
of view, seem all mere servants or employees of the great men, also work
or traffic on their own account. The lower orders then, as in the days of
Herodotus and like the modern Chinese, used to eat in the streets, buying

1 In Egypt itself stone implements seem to have been used — no doubt, as a matter of
economy — by the poorer classes, long after the use of metals had become common, just
as wooden ploughs are still in use in remote parts of France.

2 Kahnn, Giirob, and Haivara, W. Flinders Petrie, p. 26.

3 Geschichte des alien ^.gyptens, p. 183.

4 Unless, indeed, they are derived from cuneiforms, according to the more recent view,
which seems in the ascendant. It is any way possible that the cosmopolitan traders who
introduced the general use of alphabets/as distinct from syllabic characters, derived the
hint for the epoch-making invention from Egypt.

5 Maspero, Gazette Archeologique, vol. vi. p. 97.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY. 99

prepared food from itinerant cooks. In one group the customer, if one
can use such a term when both parties are selling, holds out and offers a
" pair of stout sandals," while the other says : " Here is some sweet sat
drink for thee." Another woman holds out two white vases : " Here is
the scent nemsit to give you pleasure ; " in another scene the customer
offers blue and red beads in exchange for some unknown object, and the
shopkeeper says, " Let us see ; give the equivalent." Another client of
the same dealer offers a fan : " Here is a fan for thee ; fan thyself." In
another case, three brushes and a sort of bellows are offered. Three of
the parties buying carry a sort of casket, containing perhaps beads or some
other substitute for money ; one of these is buying a fish, which the dealer
cleans, and the legend, unfortunately defaced, is so long as to suggest that
the volubility offish-markets is as old as history itself.

Similar scenes in monuments of the middle kingdom represent the pro-
vision markets held for boatmen by the river. No doubt, among the
Egyptians, as everywhere else where trade is carried on without money,
some few standard commodities were used, both as a measure of value and
to make up the differences between the articles exchanged ; copper wire
was certainly used in this way, and the price of a valuable article, such
as an ox, was assessed at such a weight in copper, though the equivalent
actually given consisted of honey, walking sticks, and a variety of other
articles, each estimated as worth so much in wire.1 Most probably, as
in China, the small wares brought to market represented not so much
the work of independent artisans as the surplus home-grown, home-made
produce of rustics who had not yet adopted special trades.

The general state of the arts and industries, and the division of labour in
customary use in later times, is illustrated by a document belonging to the
age of the Ramessids, containing the demand for an exact report of the
numbers of employees, presumably attached to some temple.2 The querist
enumerates the classes concerning which he expects information : the agricul-
tural labourers, by name ; the clerk of the works ; the man of letters ; the
workers in wood and metal ; agricultural associations of all kinds ; skilled
artisans, messengers, superintendents of agriculture ; the major-domo, the
military commandant, horoscopists, the chamberlain, the "scribe of the
table," " checkers," or, as we should say, perhaps, auditors, a class hardly
to be dispensed with in a community so much given to book-keeping ; the
apothecary, the baker, confectioner, cook, chief of the wine-tasters, the
chief of the works, the steward and foreman of the metal and wood workers,
sculptors, foremen and chief of the foremen of the masons and labourers,
well-sinkers, barbers, shoemakers, and basket-makers.

This list represents the varied personnel settled on, or attached to, every
large estate, public or private ; and indeed, no circumstance concerning
the manners and customs of the Egyptians is better known than the varied
character of their arts and industries. Bronze was the metal in common use;
but in working the hardest stones, circular saws of this metal were tipped
1 Erman, i. 179; ii. 657. 2 Chabas, Melanges, ii. 131.

ioo OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

with precious stones, — even, it has been suggested, diamonds. In the
Twelfth Dynasty mention is made of a " chief of the goldsmiths," and of the
son of such a personage ; but the arts of metallurgy are not much illustrated
in the wall-pictures. Little is known also of the processes of manufacture
of Egyptian faience, which are still in some respects unsurpassed ; blue and
green were the favourite colours, as lapis lazuli and malachite were the
most precious stones. It has been doubted whether the earliest representa-
tions supposed to refer to glass-blowing do not rather depict a furnace for
metal-working ; but, subsequently, glass was known as " the Egyptian
stone." Elektron, which is often mentioned as of high value, was probably
an alloy of two parts silver to three of gold. Choice examples of cloisonne
enamel belong to early days of the new monarchy, and it would be super-
fluous to insist on the perfection of much of the decorative work of the
native craftsmen. A curious example of their mechanical skill was found
at Hawara — a pair of socks, with the covering of the great toe detached,
made in felt, without any trace of seam, in a manner which modern pro-
cesses would altogether fail to equal.

In the Twentieth Dynasty, we find men who record themselves as
weavers by profession ; taste in dress tended to settle upon the finest white
fabrics, and the accounts of the achievements of the looms — 340 threads to
the inch — seem almost incredible. We know that the Egyptian women
were wont to drape, one cannot say to veil, their graceful forms in trans-
parent robes, finer than the finest silk ; and the same taste which enabled
them to mix the brightest primary colours, without crudeness, in the decora-
tions of their buildings, seems to have warned them against the use of
colours on the figures to be seen against these brilliant backgrounds.

§ 2. ART AND ARCHITECTURE.

The most important and characteristic of all the arts of Egypt, and those
to which we owe our knowledge of all the rest, were, of course, those of the
architects — builders, sculptors, and painters — who erected and adorned the
tombs and temples which have survived the births and deaths of so many
younger empires. The scale and outline of any monumental work was
generally determined by the person at whose command it was undertaken.
The high officers, who boast of having rejoiced the heart of the master by
their supervision of great works in his honour, were seldom professional
architects ; or rather, it may be doubted whether the work of the architect,
in the modern sense, went much beyond a general choice of the scale, pro-
portions, and material of the projected edifice ; such directions, in fact, as
a modern patron of the arts gives to an architect, in total uncertainty as to
the elevation that will be prepared in consequence. Such directions might
be given by the king himself, and any officer of the court would be qualified
to see that they were being carried out. The portion of the work requiring
technical knowledge and hereditary skill was that left, as we should say,
to the builder rather than the architect. Indeed, the difference between

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY. 101

the master builder and the skilled mechanics under him was probably one
of degree rather than of kind. According to Polybius,1 when the island of
Rhodes suffered from an earthquake, 100 architects and 250 workmen were
sent as a gift from Alexandria to restore the Colossus, and the proportion
between the two classes speaks for itself.

The buildings of Egypt were erected by common labourers and skilled
working "architects," mechanical artists, trained in the same school, and
each fully competent to carry out his own special portion of the work. As
an inscription of Thothmes III. tells us : " Each of the temple artists knew
the plan, and was well instructed in the mode of carrying it out. No one
betook himself away from that which was given him to do." The plan was
always of the simplest ; just as the Pyramid is only a magnified and perma-
nent mound, the great temple of Karnak is only an extension of the other
primitive form of tomb, a stone hut, or roofed parallelogram of massive
structure. The buildings are such as children put together with oblong
bricks. There is very little architecture, properly so called, and the absence
of variety and relief has been justified on the ground that such work is
wasted under the dazzling sunlight of Egypt, which makes columns and
towers look almost flat. The same cause which neutralizes all effects de-
pending upon light and shade also makes the whole atmosphere seem iri-
descent, and gives an unimaginable depth and variety to the simple coloured
decorations of the massive surfaces of Egyptian building.

The latest historians of ancient art do not sanction the idea that there is
anything mysterious in the perfection of the best Egyptian monuments ;
the work is sometimes excellent, sometimes careless, and the superstructure
was sometimes too heavy for the foundation. The dry Egyptian climate
has had as much to do with their preservation as their original massiveness ;
and even in Egypt time and weather are so far destructive, that we find the
monuments of the Ptolemies and the Ramessids in a fresher state of pre-
servation than any buildings of the Middle or the Ancient monarchy, the
Pyramids, of course, excepted. As to the difficulties of construction in
buildings of such vast proportion, it should be remembered that the me-
chanical appliances of modern engineering are more labour-saving than
force-producing. With unlimited command of human muscle, there is
hardly any mechanical achievement that may not be compassed by the
simple use of the inclined plane and lever,2 with an elementary knowledge
of the properties of solid bodies such as civilization tends to obscure with
most of us.

Lady Duff Gordon describes the curious appearance of a crowd of men
carrying huge blocks of stone up from a boat, and adds : " One sees
exactly how the stones were carried in ancient times ; they sway their
bodies all together, like one great lithe animal with many legs, and hum a
low chant to keep time. It is quite unlike any carrying of heavy weights

1 v. 89.

2 " And perhaps a kind of elementary crane." (History of Art in Ancient Egypt. By
George Perrot and Charles Chipiez (Eng. tr.), ii. 72.)

102 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

in Europe."1 A mural picture of the Twelfth Dynasty at Berscheh shows a
colossal alabaster statue of the nomarch being dragged along by ropes, at
which nearly two hundred men are pulling in couples,2 and it is practically
certain that the labour for all great buildings was provided in this way.

The erection of colossal monolithic obelisks or statues always remained
an exceptional and memorable achievement, justifying the boast that u no
king had done the like since the days of the sun-god Ra." Amenhotep,
the chief architect of the third king of that name, makes this remark con-
cerning the " two portrait statues of noble hard stone," one of which is
now known as the statue of Memnon : and it is curious to find, along with
the record of their astonishing breadth and height, a critical comment by
the ancient artist to the effect that "their completed form made the
propylon look small." 3 The sense of proportion which played so large a
part in the theory and practice of Egyptian art had clearly attained to
complete self-consciousness, as indeed might have been inferred from the
deliberate exaggeration of the size of the head in these colossal statues,
made to allow for the effect of perspective, and from the trick of narrowing
passages so as to increase their apparent length.

The wise artist, Iritisen, whose family history will be referred to later,
is made to describe his skill in terms which show us the wide range of
the architect's work, and the somewhat mechanical conception entertained
of the artist's. " I know," he tells us, " I know what belongs to sinking
waters, the weighings done for the reckonings of accounts, how to produce
the form of issuing forth and coming in, so that a member may go into its
place. I know the walking of an image of man, the carriage of a woman,
etc."4 The sculptors are described in the hieroglyphs as "givers of life,"
partly of course in reference to the posthumous existence which their skill
secures for the deceased ; but a rather singular effect is produced by the
bas-reliefs which represent the artists at work upon their statues, because
the living man and the stone image are represented in exactly the same
manner, and the one is to the full as life-like as the other.

The early development of ihe school of realistic art which flourished
under the first six dynasties is a fact that admits of no explanation ; it is as
remarkable in its way as the sudden development of ideal Greek sculpture
in the age of Pericles, or the masterpieces of the Khmers at Angcor, and
it is only more inexplicable, in so far as we know less of the conditions
under which the artists grew up, whose genius is after all an ultimate fact.
The genius of these earliest Egyptian artists seems to have been singularly
independent of accidental circumstances, their work being equally spirited
and truthful in wood, bronze,5 and the hardest stone, such as diorite.

1 Lady Duff Gordon, Last Letters, p. 154.

2 Lepsius, Denkmaier, ii. 134. s Brugsch, Hist., i. 425.

4 Stele of Iritisen, ascribed by M. Maspero to the Eleventh Dynasty. (Records, x. I.)
He claims that some of the secrets of his art are known only to himself and "the eldest
son of his race." (Brugsch, i. 180.)

5 Cf. for the undated bronze statues, ascribed from their style to the ancient monarchy.
Musee du Louvre (Catalogue de Sculpture £gyptienne, E. Revillout, 1890); No. 177,
adjoining the famous 5th dynasty polychrome statue of a scribe.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY. 103

There is a statue of this period at the Louvre, representing a scribe, sitting
cross-legged with a perfectly modelled torso,1 and the museum at Gizeh con-
tains statues showing easy and natural action of all kinds— a baker kneading
bread, a man with a burden leaning back and resting it on a support, and
others not less realistic than the well known wooden She^'k-el-Beled.

The wall pictures of tombs and temples, in which of course the
mysteries of perspective are unmastered, had never reached the same
degree of realism as the sculptures. The earliest tombs gave more space
in proportion to merely secular scenes, treated as realistically as the
artist's knowledge permitted ; and in spite of the quaint mixture of full face
and side view, adhered to systematically from the first, it may be doubted
whether anything like the same vigour, truth, and picturesqueness could
be achieved, even by a correctly drawn outline, when the Egyptian feeling
for harmony of line and arrangement was missing.

The gradual substitution of stereotyped representations of the Under
World, and the posthumous adventures of the soul, was due to the develop-
ment of mysticism and mystical theology in the priesthood. By an equally
gradual process the priests became more of scribes and less of artists, till
the figures of the gods came to be outlined in the spirit of a writing master,
and human figures copied the conventional type adopted for the divine.

A deliberate attempt was made under the Saite kings to revert to the
ancient models, but the work of this renaissance is easily distinguished,
now that the fact of its existence and the revival of the worship of early
kings connected with it has been recognised. The kings alone always
continued to be represented in the round, and here it may almost be said
that the Egyptian conventionalism was a real idealization, an attempt —
and in the case of colossal statues a successful attempt — to attain the
beauty of impassive grandeur, even though at the expense of realistic
truth. There is no grandeur in mere size, and arms and legs twenty times
as large as life would offend us if portrayed with merely photographic
accuracy; but if the artist ignores instead of magnifying the trifling
surface details of humanity, so that the sculptured body becomes a mere
pedestal for a beautiful countenance, visible as a god's might be from
afar, suggesting by its vastness a superhuman dignity and strength, the
effect produced is one which we may recognise as impressive and, in its
kind, scarcely inferior to the wonders of Greek and Italian art.

The builder's art no doubt stood higher than any other of a material
kind, owing to its importance, or one might even say its sanctity, in con-
nection with the immortality of kings. Pharaoh himself would show the
depth of his interest in a new construction by giving " the first stroke of
the hammer" himself; and so exactly did this form answer to the modern
ceremony, of laying a foundation stone, that an ornamental set of tools,
belonging to Thothmes III., and used by him "when he drew the cord
over ' Amon glorious on the horizon/ " supplies the most complete ex-

1 See, for photograph of similar statue last discovered, Archaeological Report Eg. Expl.
Fund, 1892-3, p. 25.

io4 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

ample in our museums of the implements in common use,1 and at the
same time suggests that the silver trowels used on similar occasions by
great personages in our own day may not prove altogether without historic
interest to a remote posterity. The same sort of interest attaches to a
plummet with the owner's or the maker's name on it, which was discovered
in the pyramid of Unas (Fifth Dynasty) ; and in general it may be said that
any one of sufficient importance, personal or professional, to leave his
mark upon the monuments, is shown by that fact alone to have filled a
position of some consequence ; while if his profession was what we call
mechanical, that will only prove that the pursuit of mechanical arts was
not incompatible with such a station.

The "chief of the artists of Upper and Lower Egypt who knows the
secrets of the houses of gold," 2 a title met with in the new monarchy,
evidently belongs to an officer of comparatively high rank, and it is
possible that the chief priest of Memphis, the servant of " Ptah who
creates the works of art,"3 was really chief of an Egyptian "Board of
Industry," like the Chinese department of public works described in the
Chow-Li. The natural sense of his title is " Chief leader of the artists or
craftsmen," or "of the work," and the chief priesthood may have been
associated with the presidency of the one of the " Six great houses" alluded
to in ancient texts, corresponding to the Works Department. Whether
evidence in support of this conjecture proves to be forthcoming or not, it
is clear that the leading members, even of mechanical callings, took rank
with at least the middle grades of the priesthood and the bureaucracy.

With regard to the rank and file of the industrial population, we are
enabled to fill in the shadows from the well-known papyri on the Praises
of Learning. These are school or academic exercises intended to en-
courage students in the pursuit of learning by dwelling on the material
advantages of the position to which a knowledge of letters is the key.

§ 3. THE PRAISE OF LEARNING.

A MS. apparently belonging to the reign of the second Rameses, of
which the composition is referred to the Twelfth, or even to the Sixth
Dynasty, enumerates all the different industries and their attendant draw-
backs, with details which cannot be omitted in any complete picture of
Pharaonic civilization.4 The writer passes in review the life of the black-
smith, gasping with the heat of his forge, malodorous in person, with hands
like a crocodile's skin ; the carpenter tilling toilsomely a barren field of
wood; the stone cutter who seeks employment in hewing the hardest
stones, and is rewarded with broken knees and back. There is the barber
who wanders from street to street in search of clients, and " wearies his
hands to fill his belly ; " the little labourer " having a field," is beaten with
a stick upon his legs ; the perilous existence of the builder is described
with graphic touches, perching on scaffolding and making his nest in

1 Erman, ii. p. 603. 2 //;., p. 610. 3 /#., p. 393. 4 Records, viii. 147.

COMMERCE AND JNDUSTRY. 105

slings, he is far from the wholesome food and water of earth ; the
gardener's hands are at his neck, seeking to lighten the burden of two
heavy yokes, morning to night he must manure and water, first one crop
and then another ; the farmer's clothes are never renewed ; the courier
going to foreign parts bequeaths his goods to his children for fear of beasts
and Asiatics ; the fowler suffers from uncertain sport ; the domestic weaver
is " more wretched than a woman, his knees are at the place of his heart,
he has not tasted the air," and moreover he must do a full task or bribe
the porter with bread to let him return home ; " what the shoemaker bites
is (only) leather " 1 (that is to say, after piercing his stubborn material with
an awl, he has to pass the thread through the hole and draw it out with
his teeth) ; the maker of weapons, the dyer, the sandal-maker, the washer-
man, who is " neighbour to the crocodile," and the fisherman, are no better
off. " Consider there is no employment destitute of superiors, except the
scribe, who is the first, for he who knows letters, he then is better than
thee." The unlearned, whose name no one knows, is like a heavily laden
ass, and the scribe is his driver ; he who has set knowledge in his heart is
chief over every work and becomes a wise prince ; the learned man eats
his fill because of his learning, even the College of Thirty and the post of
ambassador are within his reach, while the goddess of fortune turns her
back upon the hater of books.

The woes of the labourer or farmer are described more particularly as
equalling the hard case of one who is " selected " (sc. for forced labour) ;
and the natural hardships to which the husbandman is exposed are dwelt
upon frequently ; " locusts drawn up to plunder, Nile water too low and
wells dry ; " or again : " The worms have taken one half of the food and
the hippopotamus the other ; many mice were in the fields ; locusts have
descended on them ; the cattle have eaten and the sparrows have stolen ;
what was left upon the threshing floor, thieves have made away with.
Then the scribe lands upon the bank and demands the crop, his com-
panions carry sticks and the negroes palm rods ; they say, ' Give corn,'
there is none there. Then they bind him and beat him as he lies, they
cast him into the canal and his head goes under ; his wife is bound before
his eyes, and his children put in chains ; his neighbours flee to save their
corn." Or in another version of the inexhaustible theme : " Hast thou not
considered the estate of the husbandman? Caterpillars, rats, beasts,
crows, and sparrows devour his crops ; he has to keep watch against
thieves, his horses die, his ploughshare rusts, the tax-collector waits for the
gathered sheaves." All callings are toilsome, only "the scribe is released
from labour, he is the manager of all businesses ; " a or, to use the phrase
which describes the way that all businesses are managed, "he alone is
sent to perform commissions."

It may be noted that some of these phrases are evidently part of the
rhetorical stock-in-trade of the literary class. Thus in the Instructions of

1 Cf. Tomb of Rekhmara, p. 52 and pi. xv., where the act is portrayed.

2 C. W. Goodwin, Hieratic Papyri, p. 251. Cambridge Essay rs, 1858.

io6 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

Amenemhat the description of general tribulation includes the features
" locusts drawn up to plunder, water low and wells dry," as evils not affect-
ing only one class of the population. Indeed, considering how artistically
the shadows have been heightened in this picture of the woes of all who
are not scribes, we are not obliged to draw from it conclusions adverse to
the generally accepted view as to the cheerfulness and prosperity of ancient
Egypt.

With the exception of a few abuses which were kept on the whole fairly
well in check, the eulogist of letters is obliged to prove his point by re-
presenting manual labour as an evil in itself, and it is a happy state in
which the masses have no worse evil than this to complain of. Even the
scribe did not find the processes of development quite painless, for his
teachers mingle warning with encouragement. "A young man has a back ;
he hears when he is beaten j"1 and we may even conclude, from the pains
taken to recommend the calling of the scribe, that its superior attractions
were not so self-evident as to make all young men eager to embrace them.
The profession was not over-crowded, because the average youth found it
easier and, on the whole, pieasanter to follow the humbler, if less honour-
able paths of industry, which required a less arduous initiation.

§ 4. MANUFACTURERS AND APPRENTICESHIPS.

An hieratic papyrus of the Louvre, 3 supposed to belong to the
Eighteenth Dynasty, shows a rather surprising development of the manu-
facturing system to have taken place at that early date. A scribe complains
to the director of a flax and linen factory that one of his operatives has been
taken from him and given to another foreman. The change had been
made at the request of the girl's mother, who accused Ahvnes (the scribe)
of keeping her on as an apprentice without pay, after she had learned her
business, in order to retain the value of her work himself. The scribe
replied that the apprentice did not yet know the trade. The letter is incom-
plete, and so we do not know how the dispute was settled ; it shows, how-
ever, that besides the smaller domestic workshops, factories existed, which
were managed on the same system as the ordinary agricultural operations.
Very possibly such a factory did not do more than make up the flax
produced upon a single estate;3 but the employment of girls as wage-
earners at such a date is significant of the independent and unsecluded life
of women, and the controversy about the apprentice shows that the
system, largely used in Babylonia, was also familiar in Egypt.

It was common for masters to apprentice their slaves, and parents
their children, to persons engaged in trades, under agreements varying
according to the difficulty of the trade in question. Sometimes the work

1 Maspero, Du Genre Epistolaire, p. 148. Erman, ii. p. 443.

a Deveria, Catalogue, p. 192.

8 In China, at the present day, it is common for a landowner who grows silk or cotton
to have both a factory for the production and a shop for the sale of the manufactured
article.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY. 107

of the apprentice was considered as an equivalent for his maintenance,
sometimes it was paid for separately, and a fee for tuition charged besides ;
but more commonly it was stipulated that the master should be allowed
gratis so many months' work after the apprentice had learned the trade.
Such frauds as that of which Ahmes was accused were guarded against
by the stipulation of penalties if the trade were not properly taught within
the usual time. These agreements were much commoner in Babylonia
than Egypt; but as the latter country always had manufactures enough for
her own use, if not for foreign commerce, some such system as that in-
dicated in the Louvre papyrus must have grown up as soon as the whole of
the country had become fully settled.

One of the many crimes of which a certain Paneba was accused x (in the
reign of Seti II., Nineteenth Dynasty) was that of setting men to keep
cattle, and women to weave stuffs for him, without right ; and the juxta-
position of the two employments seem to show that both were incidental
to the management of landed property— both, in fact, services which a
master was entitled to expect from his ration-eaters, but not voluntarily
rendered by independent labourers to persons without recognised
authority.

The large estates of the ancient Empire bore a comparatively scanty
population, and included, besides the cultivated area, a considerable
amount of reclaimable wastes then only used for sport. With the sub-
division of these estates, cultivation became more exhaustive, and, no
doubt, different properties came to produce different staples. The rule
was still for the country gentleman to grow a little of everything on his
own lands, for his own use; -but the owner of an estate consisting, for
instance, principally of flax fields, would have a factory for its conversion
into linen, just as the ordinary farmer converted his corn into flour, or his
sesamum seeds into oil. Whether the existing manufactures were carried
on upon a larger or a smaller scale, the modus operandi was probably
always the same, and the occasional existence of a factory does not
warrant us in assuming the existence of a class of manufacturers ; that is,
of a special section of the employing class, standing to the artisans of the
country in the same relation as the great landowners to the cultivators
working on their estates. Trades were in the hands of poor freemen,
not of slaves, and this by itself shows the industrial economy of the
country to have had more in common with that of modern China than of
ancient Italy or Greece. Late Greek papyri show that other Egyptian
trades besides the undertakers were organized in guilds, which paid their
taxes collectively, and no doubt looked after the conduct of their members
in relation to each other, and to their customers ; and these organizations are
far more likely to represent ancient native custom than foreign innovation.

1 Plainte contre un malfaiteur. Birch and Chabas. Chabas' Melanges Egyptologiques,
173-246, also published separately by the Society of Biblical Archaeology.

CHAPTER IV.

CASTE AND DESCENT.

THE whole fabric of Egyptian civilization and society is so uniform, so
simple, and yet so massive, and, like the monuments of its art, so calmly
impenetrable to decay or change, that it is particularly difficult to deal
analytically with its different aspects and elements. As botanists tell us that
every plant is an arrangement of more or less variously modified leaves,
so, in the land of the papyrus and the lotus, every relationship seems
intended to reproduce the state of friendly sociableness or affectionate
utility which is the essence or condition of domestic happiness ; and the
information to be gathered from existing sources, respecting laws, religion,
custom, and history, is so mingled together as to make it doubtful whether
any one of these can be understood alone.

Questions as to the ownership of land in Egypt have been mixed up
with theories as to the privileges of priests and soldiers, which form a part
of the general problem as to the existence of hereditary caste ; and the
views taken on this point have, in their turn, an important bearing on the
history and position of the monarchy. The rule governing the succession
to the throne is connected both with the political and the family organiza-
tion, and the provision actually made for the priesthood and the military
class touches both the industrial and the administrative system ; so that
no arrangement of topics can altogether do away with the risk of repeti-
tions and anticipations.

The question whether anything answering to what we now call caste
existed in Egypt has been discussed at rather disproportionate length.
The Greek authors, who are quoted to prove that occupations were heredi-
tary in Egypt, of course knew nothing of the strict caste system of later
India, and certainly did not mean to assert that such a system existed in
Egypt. And, in fact, in the words of Dr. Birch : " The keystone of caste,
the limitation of marriage to women of the same order, is unknown to
monumental Egypt." 1

In general, legislation in restraint of private conduct is at a minimum in
States of the Egyptian type ; positive customs abound, and are observed

1 Cf. Gardner Wilkinson, Manners and Ctistoms of the Ancient Egyptians, i. 159.
In India, the words for caste have two senses, denoting respectively "colour" and
"birth; "but Dr. Birch's phrase is justified, because the strongest examples of caste
feeling are met with, when a supposed superiority of race shows itself by the peremptory
exclusion of marriages of disparagement for the women of the superior stock. In the
discussion of Brahminical claims by the Buddhists, we find the sentence : " I do not call
one a Brahman on account of his birth or of his origin from (a particular) mother." But
when, as in the Ambattha Sutta, the Buddha is made to claim actual superiority over
Brahmans for the warrior caste, he rests it upon the greater strictness of their marriage

CASTE AND DESCENT.

109

with singular and spontaneous uniformity ; and foreigners, noticing the
general course of conduct correctly, may be forgiven for assuming it to
have been dictated by law, especially when it was such as would certainly
not have been enforced without penal sanctions in their own country.

The population in Egypt was divided into several classes, and in any
simple conservative community the usages of different classes are clearly
defined and distinguished by custom without the help of law. Caste
certainly does not exist in China, yet native and foreign authors of various
dates have described the population as divided into classes, and take for
granted that sons succeed their fathers in the calling of their class. The
occupation, for instance, of particular streets or quarters by artificers of the
various kinds was said to be recommended on the ground that boys will
learn their father's trade more easily for seeing that, and nothing else,
constantly practised all round them.1

In India the obligations of caste have become so numerous and burden-
some, that their observance can only be kept up by a belief in supernatural
penalties ; but the religion of the first historic nations was in many ways
rationalistic, and its observances were not suffered to become onerous. It
was characteristic of the easy-going Egyptian temperament to waive so
much of the customs of caste as imposed an obligation, and only retain as
much of them as constituted a privilege. Though the monuments tell us
little about the duty of a son to follow his father's calling, they are eloquent
about his right to enter upon his father's emoluments, and to " sit in his
seat/' — or in that of the father of his mother, should that happen to be
the more valuable privilege. In all classes alike, it was the rule for the
son to wish to have the means of exercising his father's calling ; to do so
was a right rather than a duty, whether it was a question of building
temples for the king or burying the inhabitants of a district. Every
occupation was, in a manner, established and endowed with customary
emoluments ; and the heir to any definite place in the industrial world might
be said to inherit " a living," in the same sense as the son of a beneficed
clergyman who is his own patron. Occupation was hereditary in Egypt,
in just the same way as property; and in spite of the scribes' libels on the
life of labour, we may conclude that this inheritance was habitually claimed

law ; the son of a Brahman, by a Khattiya woman, or of a Khattiya by a Brahman woman,
may eat, study, or marry with Brahmans; but Khattiyas will not anoint the son of
either of those marriages to Khattiya rank — in the first place, because he "is not born on
his mother's side," and in the second, because "he is not born on his father's side."
Whence Gotama concludes the Khattiya to be superior in rank, so far as that rests on the
law of marriage and descent, though " the man of perfect conduct and knowledge is best
among gods and men." (Buddhism, by Bp. Copleston, p. 234 ff.) A Brahman might marry
a woman beneath him in caste, and a Kshatriya might not even marry one above him — if
such there were. So that the warrior caste is the real stronghold of caste feeling, by its
insistence on pure birth on both sides. And in this context it is interesting to note
that the earliest mention of the Dravidians (among whom the principle of female
descent is so strong), in Manu and the Mahabharata, calls them Kshatriyas, not Sudras.
(Caldwelfs Dravidian Grammar, p. ill.)

1 In Abydos, a special quarter or district was occupied by painters and sculptors, and
the "district of workers in copper" is also mentioned. (Rec. de Trav,> xi. p. 31.)

no OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

because of its possessing some tangible value, as if the poorest classes
had a vested interest in life.

The national customs regarding inheritance are so closely interwoven
with the theory of descent, that it will be convenient to examine the latter
first. The original rule of Pharaonic succession seems to have borne a
close resemblance to that of the Incas. The essential thing was for the
prince to be of the royal blood on both sides, and if there was no other
way of securing this, the king must marry his sister ; he was not obliged to
do so under all circumstances, but the frequency of the practice seems to
point to its having been preferred as giving the utmost directness to the
royal line of descent. The son of a king who had married a stranger or a
subject was not strictly legitimate, and sooner or later his descendants were
driven to rehabilitate themselves by a royal marriage, the offspring of which
again would be fully legitimate. A prince who reigned in right of his
royal wife was also not regarded as a legitimate king, and though his au-
thority might be fully recognised ad interim, it was for his interest to
associate his son with himself upon the throne as soon as he could. The
legitimacy of such a son was unquestioned ; and as the father could not
transmit a better title than he possessed, this fact by itself shows that
royal descent on the side of the mother was alone absolutely indispensable.

If Khufu and Khafra were each sons of their predecessor, they must
have married their sisters, for their wives are described as daughters of the
king. Nearness to the royal person gives the highest title to distinction,
and the queen's rank is therefore the more exalted, the more numerous the
relations in which she stands to the king. The king's wife takes precedence
of the king's mother, and the royal mother, daughter, and wife, who is also
royal sister, ranks higher than one who is only daughter, wife, and mother,
because she stands in one more relationship to the head of all humanity.
As "royal sister" was regarded as an honorific title for the queen consort,
it is, however, possible that it was given, like the title of " eldest " or
" royal son," when not literally deserved, so that unions of this kind may
have been somewhat less numerous than they seem.

The Pharaohs were before everything native princes, and the same
theory of inheritance runs through the population. The sister-marrying is
not, as with the Incas, a custom of the royal family alone ; indications of
it are frequent in private tombs and romantic papyri, and it is often associ-
ated with ideas of inheritance. In the stele of Iritisen, the members of the
family enumerated are the deceased artist, his wife, two sons, then another
son and daughter, and their son ; and it is significant that in such a list
the son of the incestuous marriage should be the only descendant of the
second generation named. The artist himself is described only as "son of
the lady Ad." Two stone cutters employed in the quarries at Hammamat
in the reign of Amenemhat III. were accompanied by their "sisters," who
must certainly have been their wives ; 1 and either from choice or policy,
each of the four kings Thothmes seem to have been similarly wedded.

1 Erman, p. 221.

CASTE AND DESCENT. in

In the Lamentations of I sis and Nephthys^ the goddess calls upon Osiris :
" Come to thy sister, come to thy wife, I am thy sister by thy mother ! " A
as if to emphasize the distance between the Egyptian point of view and the
Hebrew or Athenian feeling, which tolerated marriage with a half-sister on
the paternal side only. "The sister who is in thy heart, who sits by thee;"
** thy beloved sister with whom thou delightest to converse," are frequent
expressions evidently to be understood of the wife and lady of the house,
and in amatory poetry the word sister is used as synonymous with beloved.2
Of course when this association of ideas had become firmly established,
a beloved one who was not a sister might be called so nevertheless ; but the
two phrases could not have become interchangeable unless such marriages
had been common to begin with.3 Judging from the monuments, they were
less common anciently than during the decline and fall of Egypt, when two-
thirds of the inhabitants of Arsinoe were said, during the reign of Commodus,
to have married their sisters.4

We do not know whether the custom was restricted to half-sisters or to
cases in which the sister had special hereditary rights, either as eldest child
or as daughter; but it probably originated with some such motive, the
object in view being to give to a son rights or privileges which went norm-
ally to a daughter's husband. The son of such a son-in-law constantly
figures as the heir of his mother's father ; and if he has to go to the wars, it
is in the hands of his grandfather that he leaves his property. It seems
even to have been a stock jest, that the father of a son and daughter, who
wishes to follow the custom of marrying both to the children of a man of
his own profession,5 can best ensure this by marrying them to each other.
It is difficult to account for this curious development in Egypt of usages
which were either unknown or abhorrent to nearly every other nation, and
yet there must have been some reason for the introduction and tolerance
of this one flaw in the otherwise admirably conceived organization of
Egyptian family life.

There are two strongly marked features in that organization which seem
to lie at the root of the later family law — the importance attached to primo-
geniture, and the importance attached to descent in the female line ; and
nearly all that is peculiar in Egyptian institutions may be traced to the
working out of these two principles conjointly. In all ancient inscriptions
it is the rule for the person commemorated to be described as his mother's

1 Records, ii. 117.

2 " Tale of the Garden of Flowers." (Records, vi. 156.)

8 A Nineteenth Dynasty scribe is represented with his mother and "his sister who loves
him," who has the same name as the wife depicted in another place (Deveria, Cata-
logue, No. 3,068), and in genealogies it is common for a sister to be mentioned in remoter
generations. A sister of the great-great-grandfather (? his wife) is mentioned when the
ancestors of a man are given for seven generations. (Inscr. ined., Paul Pierret. £tudes
Egyptologiques, livr. ii, p. 53.) Cf. also Lepsius, Denkmaler, ii. 16, where King Senoferu
is accompanied by ' 'his legitimate eldestdaughter N. K., whose brother (is) the minister N."

4 Erman, s£g., p. 221.

' Tale of Setnau. " (Records, iv. 129. ) Even of the modern Egyptians it is observed by
Lane that "very often a father objects to giving his daughter in marriage to a man who
is not of the same trade or profession as himself;" but this is, of course, a very different
thing from its being illegal or irreligious for him to do so.

ii2 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

son : " So-and-so, born of So-and-so," or as the phrase is commonly
rendered in English versions, So-and-so, whose mother is So-and-so. Out
of one hundred funeral papyri, described by M. Deve'ria,1 in which the
name and titles of the deceased are preserved, there are sixty-one in which
the mother only is named, four in which the father only is named, and
seventeen in which neither parent is mentioned. In one the deceased
woman is only described as wife, her husband's father being named also,
and in one the mother and sister (? wife) of the deceased are mentioned
and portrayed. Thus in seventy-seven cases the parentage is known on
the mother's side as against twenty on the father's. The proportion is not
very different in the earliest of these documents, which go back to the
Twentieth, Nineteenth, and Eighteenth Dynasties, as in seven cases out often
the mother is mentioned, and in the remaining three neither parent ; and
in inscriptions of the Ancient and Middle kingdoms, it is the uniform prac-
tice to give the mother's name alone.2 The king of Egypt was regarded
as the divine son of heaven and earth, but the earliest inscription met with
on a royal coffin traces the king's divinity to his mother : " Osiris Men-ka-
ra, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, ever living, heaven begat thee, Mut
conceived thee, thou art of the stock of Seb " (Mut is the heavenly ocean,
and Seb the earth) ..." thy mother grants it thee to be a god? hence-
forth thou hast no enemies."

In seven out of the hundred papyri, instead of the simple formula "born
of So-and-so, the mother is described as the Lady Such-an-one ; " while in
one a " royal son " is described as born of a woman, named without
honorific titles of any kind. More often than not, when both parents are
named, the mother is described as "lady of the house ; " and it is possible
that in the twenty-four cases in which both father and mother are named
together, the deceased was in some more particular sense fils de famille, that
is to say, the child or heir of an eldest child or head of a family. But the

1 Catalogue du Louvre.

2 In the genealogy of Rekhmara, his mother and her father are first named, and then
his own father. (Memoirs de la Mission Archeologique Francaiseau Caire, vol. v. Tombeau
de Rekhmara, by Philippe Virey, 1889.) Egyptologists could supply evidence ad infini-
turn on this head, of which a few samples must suffice. The genealogy of the Court
architects begins with a mother. Amen says : "I was held to be my mother's son, no
other contested it with me," and he commemorates his eldest grand- daughter along with
his wife and son " (Records, vi. i). The king is said to have reigned while still unborn
" with all the dignity of the child of an hereditary princess " (Erman, p. no). Cf. also
Pierret, Inscrip. ined., ii. 33 ; viii. 98, 135. Stele of the Coronation (Records, vi. 76).
For the important and interesting genealogy of Khnumhotep, see Brugsch, Ge&graph.
Jnschr., i. 115, Maspero, Rec. de Trav., i. 161 ff., Newberry, Beni Hasan, i. 76 ff. The
phraseology of the Book of the Dead points in the same way (Pierret, xxx. i), "Mon
co2ur qui me vient de ma mere;" Ixv. 2, " L'individualite qui me vient de ma mere;"
ib. 34, " Mon coeur de ma mere." And there is an incidental allusion to the heirship of
daughters — or of sons from their mother's father — in Ani's warning, apparently addressed
to an eldest son as householder, not to say of his house : ' ' This comes to me from the
father of my mother " (so Brugsch and De Rouge, whose version here seems preferable
to that of Chabas), for it has to be shared with his brothers, and only part falls to his
own lot. Finally, in the Praise of Learning, we find among other proverbial expressions,
" Ignorance of his mother is his name," — used to denote the abyss of degradation reached
by the field labourer.

3 Wiedemann, &g.t Gesch., p. 192.

CASTE AND DESCENT. 113

frequency with which such heirship is dependent on the mothei's family
makes it almost impossible to doubt that descent was originally traced in
the female line in Egypt, though there is an enormous gulf to traverse
between any society, in which we know of or can imagine the prevalence
of this rule, and the most ancient social state known to have existed in
Egypt.

The strict principle of Mutter-Recht, or female descent, obtains without
inconvenience among the Australians or North American Indians, because
the consequences of relationship are mainly theoretical. This system gives
a man his sister's sons instead of his own for heirs, and makes the clan or
tribal connection outweigh that of the family; and when the family is
loosely organized, and the head of it has little to bequeath, — when in fact
he cares about equally for sons and nephews, and the sons have no
experience of the enjoyment of family property, which might make them
resent the loss of it, — no one has a strong interest in modifying the tradi-
tional usage. But when family life had been established on a civilized
footing, when family affection had become not only strong, but self-con-
scious, and the natural communism of affectionate families had come to
embrace the seasonable crops and ordinary tools by which industry secured
abundance in the Nile Valley, it was impossible that the transmission of
property should be allowed to take a different line from that traced by
natural affinity. As a mere matter of genealogy, the habit of tracing de-
scent through the mother might survive ; but if the father had property to
bequeath, the ancient Egyptian, we may conjecture, ceased to ignore his
paternal ancestry, and claimed descent from his father as well as, or even
sometimes instead of, from his mother.

There may have been some prehistoric interval during which family
property existed, but was transmitted exclusively, as descent had been
reckoned, through women ; and the existence of such a period would help
to explain the deep roots which sister-marrying had taken in Egypt. It
would also account for another inveterate eccentricity ; namely, the mania
of Egyptian husbands (as M. Revillout calls it) for abandoning all their
property on marriage to their wives. If by ancient custom sons and
daughters inherited from their mothers only, a father wishing to bequeath
his property to his children, or rather to ensure its passing to them as a
matter of course on their parents' death, may have found it easiest to
execute a deed of gift to his wife, which would have that legal effect in the
future, and for the present, no doubt, leave the practical communism of a
united household unchanged.1

So long, however, as property could be inherited from the mother only,
the father can have had comparatively little to bequeath,— nothing, that is,
except his own personal earnings or accumulations. Still, except in a
purely pastoral community, such earnings form an appreciable proportion
of the family property, and had it been usual for them to pass from father
to son, the importance of the maternal inheritance would have gradually
1 Cf. the marriage law of the Nairs ; infra, Book iii. ch. x.

P.C. I

ii4 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

diminished. It is entirely at variance with European ideas and prece-
dents to suppose that all such property should pass, not from father to son,
but from father to daughter; yet the consistent application of accepted
principles of law has often led since to results as remarkable, and perhaps
more injurious. Evidently, so long as it continued to be the custom for
children to inherit from their mother, any father, who wished to provide for
his children and their descendants, would naturally endow his daughters
himself, and arrange a marriage for his sons with the daughters of other
wealthy fathers. Such a way of providing for a family is just as effective
as the opposite and not more unnatural ; and there are certainly reasons
for believing it to have once prevailed in Egypt.

As already observed, when either parent of a person referred to in the
inscriptions is mentioned, it is usually the mother ; but if the reference is
carried a generation further back, the chances are that the mother's father
will be named. It was usual to call a son after the mother's father and a
daughter after the father's mother, so that four names frequently alternate
in successive generations. Under the Greeks it was the rule for the eldest
son to be named after the paternal, and the second after the maternal
grandfather, and the daughters similarly after their two grandmothers, but
this may have been a comparatively late development of the really primi-
tive national usage. Claims to inherit " from the father of my mother "
are common in all periods, and as will be seen, the history of the country
was seriously affected by the application of the principle to the royal suc-
cession. But it is doubly improbable that the right of women to transmit,
to their sons, offices which they did not exercise themselves should have
been recognised, unless their right to transmit hereditary property of a more
ordinary kind had become fully established first.

Opinion in Egypt, as in China and the Basque provinces, seems not to
have been favourable to the progressive concentration of property in the
hands of a single family, and it is probable that the marriage of brothers
and sisters was only resorted to, if the daughter's inheritance included some
office, which her brother was qualified or entitled to fill, or if the whole
inheritance of both parents was insufficient to do more than give to one
married couple the same position as their parents had. In later times the
inheritance of both parents was divided equally amongst all the children,
but in very primitive states of society the increase of population is slow,
and the Egyptian tolerance of incest would certainly not tend to accelerate
it. On the average, therefore, there would seldom be more than three
marriageable children to a marriage, and seldom less than two heirs to each
married couple, since nephews and cousins could always take the place of
children in that capacity.

In historic Egypt the legal right of children to inherit from their mother
and their natural right to inherit from their father were recognised together,
though the former was to some extent modified by the latter. The right
of the children to inherit from both parents had a different history and
dated from different periods ; but when both were established, it is not to

CASTE AND DESCENT. 115

be supposed that either parents or children distinguished between the two.
The substantial fusion of the two claims must have begun with the institution
of civilized monogamy, which, like so much of the moral furniture of the
Western world, probably had its origin in ancient Egypt or Chaldaea. But
the peculiarities of the later marriage law preserve clear traces of the long
process by which the practical result of simple equity was arrived at. In
fact, just because the oldest customs were at a very early period adapted
to the practical convenience of the people, they were allowed to retain
permanently peculiarities of form, which now enable the student of com-
parative law and custom to frame a tolerably clear estimate of their
history.

When we come to examine the details of Egyptian customs relating to
marriage and inheritance, we shall see some reason to believe that, with
or before the dawn of history, the Egyptian married pair succeeded to the
place of the prehistoric mother, at least so far as the hereditary rights of
children were concerned. It seems probable that the union entered into
with an established wife carried with it some proprietary rights, and perhaps
even made the wife, as such, so far joint owner of the family property as
was necessary to enable her to transmit it to the children of the marriage.
In the course of centuries or rather of millenniums, so much of this arrange-
ment as turned upon a legal fiction would pass into disuse. But we shall
best understand the reasonableness of the later institutions, if we realize
that they date, in all human probability, from a time when the ideas of
marriage and paternity were new and that of the inheritance of children
undeveloped.

In really primitive communities, when a man dies, his property is either
destroyed or divided among his fellow tribesmen. To claim to bequeath
it to his children might only have the effect of obliging them to fight for
it, with all the advocates of the " good old rule." 1 Hence the first motive
for a donation inter vivos, which should make the family property belong
to the desired heir, so long before his father's death, that the neighbour-
hood might form the habit of recognising his ownership. In this way the
father looks upon the endowment of his son, not as a despoiling of himself,
but as a successful assertion of his own intention.

As was natural, the archaic point of view was retained longest in regard
to the most abstract rights of inheritance, like the succession to the crown ;
where the wish of the parents was a comparatively subordinate considera-
tion, and the claim of the lawful heir in the eyes of gods and men was
independent of such wish. Two important consequences followed from
the application of the native theory of inheritance to the royal and noble
families of Egypt. When power and office, instead of passing exclusively
from father to son, pass by at least as strong a right to the son from his
mother's father, no generation could feel itself independent of royal favour ;
for the claimants have no natural vantage ground enabling them to do
without it. The growth of a powerful hereditary aristocracy was thus
1 Cf. The Melanesians, p. 63. R. H. Codrington, D.D., 1891.

n6 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

discouraged, and so far the position of the monarchy was strengthened
and the political tranquillity of the country secured. In China, which
abandoned the principle of female descent in prehistoric times, powerful
nobles might set up as independent rival kinglets, the ablest of whom
could at any time wrest the empire itself from what were thought weak or
unworthy hands. In Egypt, though the hereditary princes might be more
. or less independent of the royal authority, under ordinary circumstances
^ they made no attempt to encroach upon each other's territory. Apart
from royal appointment, the son of a hereditary lord, who married the
daughter of a neighbouring prince, was content to accept her inheritance
and let his father's pass to another child. Marriage resulted in a domestic
partnership, not a political alliance ; and the same temper which dis-
couraged the growth of strong class feeling among the common people,
prevented the formation of rival parties in the State and the concentration
of political influence in fewer and stronger hands. But the same cause
which diminished the danger of internal rivalries and rebellions increased
the chances of foreign conquest.1

Any usurper, conqueror, or invader could create a legal title for his son
by marrying a daughter of the ancient kings, and by this trifling con-
cession the allegiance of the docile population was practically ensured.
By this means dynastic struggles lost some of their bitterness, and the
chance of civil war was reduced ; but in this way too the nation began to
form the habit of submitting to alien rulers, provided only they were
content to wear the mask of the Pharaohs. Shishak, the sixth of a line of
princes of Ma, who founded the Twenty-second Dynasty of Bubastis,
describes his father Nimrod as the son of Mehat-en-susekh (an Egyptian
princess), and the phrase clearly shows that it was through her that he
claimed the crown of Egypt.2 He himself married the daughter of
Pisebkhan, a usurper, reigning at Tanis, whose wife was a lady of Thebes,
descended from the alliance between the heir of Rameses and Hirhor. A
very important inscription by Shishak or his son Sargon reinstates this
Egyptian princess, Karamat, in the possession of all her hereditary
property in the southern land, of which political events had probably
deprived her. Everything is to be restored into her hand and into the
hand <<r of her son and of her grandson, and to her daughter and to her
granddaughter, the child of the child of her daughter" 3 an expression which
is clearly a formula of legal enumeration, but of course only the more
significant on that account. In the same way, according to Herodotus,
the Egyptians claimed Cambyses as belonging to them, declaring that he
was the son of Nitetis, a daughter of Apries, whom Amasis had sent in

1 Ravvlinson's Herodotus, ii. 165, n. I (by G. Wilkinson).

2 Brugsch, Hist., ii. 197. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alien ^.gyptens, p. 330.

3 Ib., ii. p. 205. Cf. Euting's Nabatcean Inscriptions : post, Book iii. ch. viii. Among
degrees of relationship mentioned in Egyptian texts we find (Brugsch, Hurog. Diet., iv.
1151). " Son of the sister of the mother of his mother," i.e., great-nephew on the maternal
side, " daughter of the sister of her mother," and others as to which the copiousness of
the vocabulary is itself significant.

CASTE AND DESCENT. 117

marriage to the king of Persia, in place of his own child. And we may
the more readily trust Herodotus' report of this perversion of history on
the part of the Egyptians, because he clearly does not understand their
purpose in it. It is a fiction that would only have been originated where
such a way of legitimatising conquest was recognised and familiar.

The yoke of the foreigner was also made easy to the Egyptians by the
eagerness of the conquerors to adopt the manners and customs of their
new possession. It is strange to find the Ptolemies, as well as Cambyses,
hastening to adopt the Egyptian law of incest ; but their naturalization was
almost as complete as that of their Semitic predecessors. Cleopatra is
an Egyptian, and the mysterious charm of Egypt and Egypt's queen might
have enslaved even Romans. An Anthony would have been content to
occupy the throne of the Pharaohs ; a Caesar was needed to overthrow it
even in the last years of its decay, accelerated by the influx of irreverent
Greeks, — eager for learning and for gain, but pursuing both in ways
unknown to and irreconcilable with the social order of the Egypt of the
Egyptians.

A theory of descent which had the effect of legitimating foreign con-
quest must have been strongly rooted, in the native customs and traditions
of the past, to have survived such a damaging application ; and in fact the
right of the royal wife's eldest son to inherit the throne is recognised in a
variety of ways all through the historical period. The earliest title borne
by Egyptian chiefs is one indicating that its bearer claims his rank by
inheritance ; to be " descended " is almost synonymous with being a
prince.1 The laudatory titles, with which the royal inscriptions begin,
often describe the sovereign as ruling from even before his birth; and
the frequency with which the reigning sovereign associated his son with
himself seems to show that the rights of the heir in Egypt did not
necessarily begin with the decease of his predecessor.

The partnership which, as will be seen hereafter, existed between the
father and his lawful first-born in private life, was probably recognised
more or less by the kings as well as by the general family law of the
country. But the association was most necessary, and effected at the
earliest age in the case of sons whose title was better than their father's ;
and this was naturally most often the case with the founders of new
dynasties, long before such a character was assumed by foreigners. The
partnership between husband and wife, which is also a feature of Egyptian
family law, probably furnished the step by which the association of the two
theories of descent was effected. The king succeeded to his father's office
in virtue of his mother's blood.

The law ascribed, according to Manetho, to Bainuter (Binothris), a
king of the Second Dynasty, allowing women to inherit the throne, can

1 The word read erpa or ropa, and rendered hereditary prince, has this sense. Sibou,
the father of Osiris, and therefore presumably an ancient deity, is called ropa noutirou,
ropa of the gods, whereas Amon of Thebes is Sztten = King, which, as M. Maspero
points out (Journ. As., 8th Sen, xi. p. 265), suggests that there was a time when the
ropa was the highest dignitary known.

n8 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

hardly have had exactly that object, as queens regnant are not frequent
in Egypt. It may be that the earliest rule of succession was peremptory
in requiring the king to be of royal descent on both sides, and that the
innovation lay in the discovery that 'a dynasty need not become extinct,
for want of a son to inherit the crown, since the daughter (who, failing a
brother of her own, would certainly marry some one else) could reign,
in her own name and right, with her husband, and leave a legitimate
heir.

It is a curious question whether, in those cases where the king was
undoubtedly married to his sister, the latter was the elder child and there-
fore better entitled than he to the inheritance. Such marriages are neither
the rule nor the exception, and it is difficult to see why they should have
occurred as often as they do, if they were in no way obligatory. They
occur in fact about as often as might have been expected, supposing the
motive for them to present itself five times out of ten, and to be even
then frequently overruled by other considerations. There can be little
doubt that the famous queen Ramaka Hatasu, who was appointed by her
father, Thothmes I.,1 co-regent with himself, was considered to have some
more legitimate title to the throne than either Thothmes II., the brother
whom she married, or Thothmes III., who was associated with them in
the government, apparently in default of children of their own. In this
and similar cases the superiority must either have lain in the bare fact of
sex, which is not probable, since a son is as near a relation as a daughter
to their mother; in age, which is possible, in view of the civil rights of
elder children among the common people, but not as yet proved from the
monuments ; or in legitimacy, which was certainly the true explanation,
when, as between Hatasu and Thothmes III., the daughter was, and the
son was not, descended from a mother, herself of royal rank.2 The only
reason for doubting the universal application of this last cause is that the
king could usually have provided a son as well as a daughter with a royal
mother, if that and nothing more were needed to secure the succession.
The earliest monuments show us sons inheriting from their fathers, and we
therefore find it impossible to believe that, in the Twelfth and the
Eighteenth Dynasties, the title to the crown could only pass from a mother
to a daughter ; yet in both those important periods it certainly seems to
have been considered essential that either the king's mother or his wife, if
not both, should be lineally descended on both sides from their legitimate
predecessors. The persistency of such a merely sentimental rule is a
strong presumption in favour of a former state of things in which both
inheritance and descent were counted exclusively in the female line.

To quote only a few of the cases in which Egyptian kings associate
their sons to improve their own titles, or marry wives who may improve

1 The wife and sister of Thothmes I. bears the title erpa> equivalent to royal heiress.

2 Hatasu is given a throne name in an inscription of her father's, so she reigned with
him, before marrying and reigning with her half-brother, Thothmes II. They had a
daughter, who became " heiress princess," and Thothmes III. was married to her.

CASTE AND DESCENT. 119

their sons': — The founder of the Twelfth Dynasty, Arnenemhat I., associated
his son Usurtasen in the government while the latter was still a child ;
and in the " Instructions " addressed to this prince, he speaks of enemies
who "took advantage of thy youth for their deeds," as if the king needed
his son to be of age to strengthen his hands : he speaks also of being
"assaulted by seditions in the interior of my house ; " and in the story of
vSaneha we find the Egyptian fugitive asked by his Syrian hosts if there
had been an unexpected death in the palace obliging him to leave his own
country,, as if it was a matter of common fame with either historians or
romancers that the founder of the dynasty had had to fight for both life
and throne. Saneha, on the other hand, shows his loyalty by speaking of
Usurtasen as the " king who has governed from before his birth," a formula
indicating legitimacy; and throughout the Twelfth Dynasty the association
of the son seems to have been the rule.1 In the Thirteenth Dynasty, the
succession frequently passed through princesses, the first king of it, as was
frequently the case in a change of dynasties, being supposed to inherit
from his mother.2 Most of the kings of the dynasty have names derived
from hers, notifying that they were worshippers of Sebek, the god with the
head of a crocodile.

The " beautiful companion of Aahmes," the founder of the Eighteenth
Dynasty, also occupies a very prominent place in the monuments and
genealogies of the dynasty. After her husband's death she appears as
queen regnant, not merely as co-ruler with her son (Amenophis I., who
married a sister named after his father's mother) ; and the great kings of
the Nineteenth Dynasty frequently include her among the group of
ancestors they select for more especial respect or adoration.3 It is rather
difficult to account for the importance of this lady, as she is generally
represented in the monuments coloured like an ^Ethiopian, instead of in
the light yellow shade common for Egyptian queens.4 Aahmes himself
was not only a successful soldier, but of royal birth, son of a king and
queen of the Seventeenth Dynasty, the latter of whom was the object of
much veneration ; it was therefore not particularly essential for him to
marry a royal heiress, though the quite special honours accorded to
Nofert-ari-Aahmes, and the fact that Aahmes counts as the founder of a

1 Amenemhat IV. married his sister, who was co-regent with him. (Wiedemann, sEg.
Ges., p. 256.)

2 Maspero, Histoire, p. 123. A queen Sebek-nefer-ra reigned first as consort of her
brother, the last king of the Twelfth Dynasty, and then alone ; it was either through her
or a lady of similar name and descent that the Twelfth Dynasty kings claimed to succeed.
Another king of the Thirteenth Dynasty calls himself on his monuments " son of the
queen mother Kema."

3 In the monument to two twin brothers, architects or superintendents of works to
Amenophis III., this queen appears among the gods, conferring water, and wine, and the
delicious breath of the north wind upon the deceased ; she is adored in the third place
after the gods Harmachis and Anubis. Queen Ramaka, in the same way, is mentioned
in an inscription with Osiris and Anubis, as able to give bread and wine to the deceased ;
so that the theory of royal apotheosis, which was quite unknown to the earlier dynasties,
was extended simultaneously to the king, and his royal consort. (T.S.B.A., viii. 2. 144.)

4 Her mummy, discovered in 1885, and subsequently unrolled, has decided the point
that she was not a black.

120 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

new dynasty, show that she must have brought some accession of strength
to the royal house.

It was during the Seventeenth Dynasty that Egypt was gradually reunited
after the expulsion of the Shepherds, and Aahmes is said to have received
help from the ^Ethiopians in his campaigns against them ; a service which
he repaid by again extending the borders of Egypt on the south. It has
been suggested that the beautiful dark bride brought the Ethiopian alliance
as a dowry to her husband, and that the reverence paid her was in
gratitude for the part she had thus borne in restoring Egyptian indepen-
dence. And it is true that the Egyptians in some cases gave high honours
to foreign princesses of royal lineage; the blue-eyed, fair-haired Semitic
bride of Amenophis III. (or a lady of the same name, who is represented
in flesh coloured, instead of the usual yellow, tints)/ is described in the
monuments as " royal daughter, sister, mother, and great royal wife and
lady of both Egypts;" and the daughter of an allied king of ^Ethiopia
might have received equal honour. Such an ^Ethiopian princess might have
conveyed to her son a claim to the sovereignty of ^Ethiopia, but she could
do nothing to strengthen his title to the Egyptian crown, unless she had
herself been descended from a former king; and we learn from the
cuneiform correspondence between Egypt and Mesopotamia, that the pride
of the former forbade the giving daughters of Egypt in marriage to foreign
rulers, so that this solution is of doubtful probability. The wife of
Aahmes is sometimes, though rarely, represented with the usual complexion,
while her son Thothmes is sometimes depicted as black, just as Khu-en-
aten changes his features to suit the change of his religion ; so that a black
princess may mean only a princess from, or ruling over, the land of the
blacks.

Throughout the Eighteenth Dynasty it was almost the rule for the king
to associate his son, or, as in the case of Thothmes I., his daughter, in the
government. The heretical king Khu-en-aten, with whom it closes, is
also shown by inscriptions to have reigned in right of his wife, his own
mother being the Semitic princess, Teie, already mentioned ; and it is as a
descendant of his or hers, that the mother of Rameses II. transmitted to
her son such claims to the throne, that his father, Seti I., was glad to
strengthen the hereditary right of the new dynasty by associating Rameses
in the government while still only a child.2

In the Twenty-sixth Saite Dynasty, again, between the ^Ethiopians and
the Persians, the founder, Psammetichus, married an heiress, representative
of the preceding dynasty, while the mother of Amasis was a princess of
royal rank, and nearly akin to the reigning king Apries.

We have thus a continuous series of instances showing that, throughout
the whole course of Egyptian history, the legitimacy of the sovereign was
in some way associated with the hereditary claims of the women of his

1 M. Benedite (Mem. arch., v., 3, 381) conjectures this lady to be the wife of a
Twentieth Dynasty Rameses.
a Brug^ch, Hist., ii. 23, 4.

CASTE AND DESCENT. 121

family. The importance attached to primogeniture may seem less deserving
of remark, as it is not only in Egypt that the eldest son is expected to take
precedence of his brethren.1 Yet, like every Egyptian institution, this also
has a character of its own, and both the origin and the object of the
droit d'amesse, as recognised in Egypt, appear to be intimately connected
with the organization of family life, which established first the authority of
mothers, then that of wives, and finally that of the domestic triad, consist-
ing of husband, wife, and their first-born child.

In the hypothetical state of primitive society, in which the mother is the
only fixed element in the family, there is no ground for giving precedence
to the eldest child. Sons and daughters, on reaching maturity, pass into
the cousinhood or clan, in which their place is determined by other con-
siderations than the order of their birth. The first genealogists did not
care to go beyond the statement that a man's mother and his mother's
brother were of a valiant stock. It is only when the family has been
founded, that is to say, when the father and mother of a family are united
for life to each other and their children, that the latter form a community
within which degrees of precedency can be counted.

Polygamy of the patriarchal sort is of course compatible with the insti-
tution of an eldest son and heir, though complications are liable to arise
when Ishmael happens to be older than Isaac. But the founders of the
domestic civilizations seem to have passed straight from the relations of
archaic barbarism to the highest form of civilized monogamy. Polygamy
was tolerated, but the ideal Egyptian was the husband of one lawful wife,
whose affection was his delight in life and his glory in the grave. Now
the husband of one lawful wife is the first person who can make sure of
the heirship of an eldest son ; and it seems as if the Egyptians, having
invented marriage as a permanent, exclusive relation, discovered that it
involved the existence of an eldest child, and became all the more in love
with their invention because of this, its natural consequence.

There is nothing imaginative or fanciful in this reconstruction of the
Egyptian theory of family relations. The gods themselves are commonly
arranged in triads, consisting of father, mother, and son, and the solidarity
of this group in the human family is abundantly proved by documents
ranging from the Fourth Dynasty to the Roman period. " Eldest son " is
a recognised, quasi-official title in the tomb-inscriptions of the first Six
dynasties, and in the comparatively late table of precedence, already
quoted, it is given as next in dignity to the title "royal son." Just because
the eldest son, as such, was a personage, the title came to be granted honoris
causa, like many others involving relationship to the king, so that the
epitaph writers were obliged to distinguish " real " eldest sons and royal

1 In Egypt it was a rule of propriety that the elder brother should not, in the literal
sense, take such precedence: "Place not thy person before thy brother, leaving him
behind thee" (Rev. Egypt., i. 162) is a maxim given in one of the collections of proverbial
precepts of which the Egyptians were fond, and of which the Apocryphal book
Ecclesiasticus is a fine specimen.

122 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

relations from those who had only been allowed to assume these titles by
favour.1

The elements of the character for eldest son signify to guide or lead,
with the figure of a man with a staff for determinative, and the general
sense of head of the family, the leader of the other children. The title
of " eldest son " is habitually applied to Thoth in regard to Horus, so
much so that the Rhind papyrus translates the demotic proper name Thoth
by the epithet samsou ; in other words, the god was familiarly spoken of
as Vaine ; 2 and the expression dates from the Pyramid period. Osiris is
the eldest of the five gods, and a hymn of the Eighteenth Dynasty
describes his relation to his parents and brethren in the terms considered
appropriate to virtuous mortals : " He is the eldest, the first of his brothers,
the chief of the gods ; he it is who maintains justice in the two worlds, and
who places the son in the seat of his father ; he is the praise of his father
Seb, the love of his mother NOLI." 3 But the strongest proof of the early
age at which eldest sons were distinguished, and distinguished in connec-
tion with ideas of inheritance, is furnished by the phraseology of the
Egyptian funeral Ritual, the so-called Book of the Dead. Genealogies
play an important part in all mythologies, but the religious texts of Egypt
stand alone in their habit of describing the younger god as the heir, rather
than the son of his father.

The oldest linen or papyrus copies of the Ritual which have reached us
are not earlier than the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Dynasties ;
(one of the earliest of them was inscribed in honour of a steward of the
herds of Amon and " his wife, who loves him, the lady who makes all his
delight ") ; and the earliest extant portion is the chapter on " The depar-
ture from day" (i.e. life) found on wooden coffins of the Eleventh Dynasty.4
But it is not seriously doubted that the Ritual was already ancient when
we meet with it first. The text of one chapter (the sixty-fourth) includes
the statement that it was discovered in the time of King Menkara, whose
word is truth, by Prince Har-titi-f, when he was travelling to inspect the
temples,5 and the tradition which ascribes its composition to that period
may quite possibly be authentic ; for the prince is as historical a personage
as the king, and dark sayings of which he was the author were known and
quoted in a poem attributed to an Eleventh Dynasty Antef, preserved in a
MS. of the time of Thothmes III. Indeed, it may be doubted whether
the same insistence on the heirship of the gods would have been shown in

1 We have seen that Ptah-hotep counts it as one of the first prizes of good service,
that an official will be called "son " by his chief ; and the custom is continued down to a
late period. A private person in a monument calls himself " eldest son " of Thothmes
I., and similar examples might be multiplied indefinitely.

2 Manuel de hierarchic Egyptienne, Journ. As., loc. cit. p. 271. In the Pyramid of
Pepi II., Osiris is apostrophized as the son of Seb, "his eldest." (Recueil de Travaux,
xiv. 3. 142.)

3 Hymn to Osiris, ascribed to Eighteenth Dynasty. (Records, iv. 99.)

4 Deveria, Catalogue, p. 50, I.

5 Pierret, Livre des Marts, ch. 64. The I3oth chapter is in like manner ascribed to the
Second Dynasty. (T.S.B.A., 1893, ix. 295.)

CASTE AND DESCENT. 123

compositions of a later date, when the inheritance of sons had become a
commonplace incident of every-day custom. It would seem rather as if
the same period saw the development of the religious and the domestic
ideal, so that the imagery of religious texts was borrowed from the new-
experience of the triune household, the spiritual significance of which new
creation it was indeed scarcely possible to exaggerate.

The following phrases are taken from M. Pierret's translation : l " Thy
father Seb has transmitted all his heritage to thee." . . . " The day
when Horus was constituted heir of the appanages of his father Osiris."
. . . "I am Horus the heir." . . . " I am your lord, oh gods ! I
am the son of your master, you belong to me through my father." .
" I traverse the earth as an heir in the footsteps of the manes." . . .
" I am the great first heir." . . . " Osiris the eldest of the five gods, the
heir of his father Seb." . . . " It is Horus, the brother of Horus, the
heir of Horus." . . . "I present food to the (divine) heirs." .
" Horus, the heir of Ra." . . . " I am Horus, the avenger of his
father, the son of Isis, the heir of Osiris." ..." The son of Osiris,
the heir of Ounofre," (the good being). . . . Such a collection of
passages certainly shows that the recognition of the heirship of eldest
sons is as old as any element in the social life or religious thought of the
country.

The ancient sage Ptah-hotep, whose "arrangement of good words" has
been quoted above, is careful to call himself the eldest of his race ; and
considering the scantiness of the records of the ancient monarchy, we
could scarcely expect to find more precise traces than exist of the lawful
partnership enjoyed by the first-born child in his father's property.
Amten, an officer of Senoferu, towards the end of the Third Dynasty,
distinguishes the lands which he has received from the king, and those
which he inherits from his father ; but he describes certain domains as
having been in his possession from his earliest childhood ; his father (a
learned doctor) gave them to him.2 The title "eldest son" recurs
frequently in the oldest inscriptions, together with that of "royal legitimate
son," "legitimate eldest daughter" (of King Senoferu), "noble legitimate
prince," and the like. In Egypt, as in China, all children were legitimate in
the modern sense, so that we must understand, by the word thus rendered,
the children of a legitimate or established wife, who in the first instance
probably had a lawful right, not merely to inherit, but to share the
property of their parents.

Among the Basques, where alone we meet with something similar to the
Egyptian partnership of the eldest child, it AS when the eldest child
marries, that he (or she) becomes entitled to half the family property, or
rather to an equal interest in it with the parents. In Egypt the child's

1 Le Livre des Marts, 1882, xiv. 2, xiv. 9, xxi. 5, xlvii. 2, xlviii. I, 2, Ixix. 2, Ixxviii. 39,
xcviii. 7, cxliv. 10, cxlvi. 5, 6, 24. Cf. T.S.B.A., ix. p. 300. ** This thy Festival, which
thine heir hath made."

2 Denkmdler, ii. PL iii.-vii.

124 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

interest begins at its birth, but does not necessarily involve any diminution
of the parents' control during their life.

The most significant reference at an early date to the son's owner-
ship is in a tomb of the Twelfth Dynasty, at Aswan, belonging to
Serenput, an officer of Usurtasen I., and one of those local governors
or feudal princes who were interred within their own domains. All the
members of his family are described : " his wife, the beloved of the seat
of his heart, the lady of the house, Set-ten, his dear mother, Set-ten, his
dear daughter Sati-hotep, and his dear daughter Set-ten ; " he has three
sons, and the important passage is the description of "his eldest son,
loving him, the master of his property, the ruler of his heritage, perfectly
acquainted with everything going on in his house, the prince Heq-ab, son
of Set-ten."1 Such phrases can hardly be explained away into insignifi-
cance in a land where, nearly a thousand years later, parents are habitually
described as holding property '• for their children,"2 and sign legal deeds
and documents expressly on their behalf, as agents, not as principals.

Most Oriental nations are given to the employment of intermediaries, in
all social affairs from courtships to commerce, and it is probable that the
eldest son was regarded to some extent as the natural substitute for the
father, just as the father was the agent or representative of his children.
Thus Horus is described in one passage as "The firstborn son who framed
answer when he exchanged to his seat ; " " Hor-si-esi, who gave answer (or
pleaded) for his father against Set before the tribunal of the gods ; "3 and
although we cannot be certain as to the exact associations intended to be
called up by such phrases, they seem clearly to point to some quasi-legal
assistance for which the father is dependent on his son.

It is an interesting question whether the Egyptian rule of primogeniture
was absolute like that of the Basques, among whom the eldest child, with-
out distinction of sex, is the heir. There is reason to suppose that this
may have been the case, at least to some extent ; and if it were so, this
would supply a fresh reason why the king's son should marry his sister,
when she was the eldest, and so the legitimate heir.

The development of the family forms an integral part of the history
of ownership, not only because the transmission of property is affected by
its character, but because human relatives are among the first possessions
consciously appropriated and enjoyed in a primitive, progressive State.
We still talk about " having " or not " having " parents or children, husband
or wife; and the character, or indeed the very existence, of such posses-
sion depends upon the organization of the domestic relations. The
character and value of any particular kind of ownership depends upon the
nature of the thing owned. If a master "has" a slave, the person so
described may be anything between a domestic animal and a domestic
servant ; if the slave " has" a master, it may be either as children have a

1 P.S.B.A., Nov. 1887, p. 23 ff.

2 E. Revillout, Nouvelle Chrestomathie Demotique, p. 69 ff., 1878.

3 Records, iv. 95 n.

CASTE AND DESCENT. 125

tutor or as sick men have a painful disease. Similarly the possession of
what we call a family has a different value to all its members, according to
the relations which subsist between them. As the ideal society is that
which is so ordered as to confer the greatest possible benefits on all its
members, so the ideal family is that in which the interest and happiness
of every member are equally provided for and considered, — that is to
say, in which the husband exists as much for the use and pleasure of the
wife, and the parents for that of their children, as conversely.

The stability of Egyptian society was probably due in great measure to
the completeness with which this ideal of reciprocity was realized. The
Egyptian word for a married woman, a wife as distinct from a widow, is
neb-t-hai^ the mistress or lady of a man ; the proper name for the lawful
wife whose eldest child was his father's heir is " lady of the house ; " so
that the status of the Egyptian wife included the " having " of a house and
a household of her own. Few ancient and indeed few modern States have
conceived the normal extent of married women's property on so large a
scale ; but in spite of the witticisms of the Greeks, we may be certain that
no society could flourish for 3,000 years if the "monstrous regiment of
women " had been in any way tyrannical. The subjection of men in
Egypt seems to have gone just as far as that of men, women, and children
must go in every community in which the common is preferred to the
individual advantage. Whatever may have been the details of the
Egyptian law of inheritance, its general tendency was to equalize the dis-
tribution of wealth, and to cause half of it to belong to one and half to the
other sex, so that each parent on the average had about the same amount
of property to bequeath ; and if the law was more explicit about the duty
of fathers, than as to that of mothers, in endowing their children, the only
reason must have been that even in Egypt they were, of the two, a little
more inclined by nature to neglect an obligation, which the national
opinion was exceptionally advanced in recognising. Or perhaps, the right
of the children to the paternal eslate savoured rather the more of posi-
tive institution, since it cannot have rested on so sure a base of immemorial
custom as the prehistoric right of children to share their mother's posses-
sions.

In Egypt every class of persons possessing common interests formed a
corporation, governed by rules voluntarily framed and adopted for the joint
advantage of its members. Egyptian law seems in great measure to have
realized the Chinese ideal of enabling the people to follow their own spon-
taneous inclinations, and this characteristic is most marked in all that relates
to the rules of inheritance and descent. The concern of the individual
householder did not extend beyond the fortunes of his own grandchildren,
and when their proprietary interests were secured his anxiety for the future
ceased. There was no organized section of the community interested in
overruling the inclination of individuals in the name of a party or a class.
Membership of the existing corporations was hereditary, because succes-
1 Brugsch, Hieroglyphic Diet. , sub. voce.

126 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

sive generations had the same wants and wishes, but it was only obligatory
in the sense that the benefits of membership were conditional on observ-
ance of the rules of the association.

The family law of property is the best known, as well as the most
curious part of Egyptian usage ; but before entering upon the discussion of
the later forms of it, as to which there is naturally most information avail-
able, the more obscure question of the existence of class or caste property
has to be considered. Evidently if a man inherits his father's or his
grandfather's occupation, the emoluments of the occupation belong to him
in virtue of his employment rather than as hereditary property. Each
calling consists of persons who have chosen to exercise the same functions
as their ancestors; but, as it is a right rather than a duty for them to do so,
it is individuals rather than the class that have a vested interest in its
customary emoluments. Certain persons and families have a right to
exercise given functions for given customary rewards, but the rewards can
scarcely be considered as the corporate property of the class discharging
the functions, just because they bear the character of a salary for work
done. It is probable that all classes of the community were grouped in
self-governing guilds or corporations, but we see no grounds for believing
that any class, not even the soldiers or the priests, possessed more of a
caste character than is involved in the customary transmission of offices
as well as property from parents to children. The common formula on
funeral steles illustrates the popular point of view : it conjures the passer-
by to remember the departed, "as he loves the king, wishes to thrive on
earth, and to have his office and his property inherited by his children."

Ampere's Memoir upon Caste in Egypt concludes that the mechanical
trades were very likely divided into corporations, with a more or less
hereditary character, while members of the liberal professions were free to
exchange or to combine each other's functions and to intermarry at will.
Some of his instances only prove, what is otherwise beyond doubt, that
members of priestly families might hold office of various kinds at court,
without abandoning the priesthood. But since he wrote, the mass of acces-
sible materials has been enormously increased ; and so far as we rely upon
Egyptian texts only, the evidence is distinctly against any stringent heredi-
tariness of occupation.

One grandson of an hereditary lord becomes a court official and another
a high priest ; the sons of civil officers become priests, and the sons of
priests become civil officers ; and, though the son of a chief prophet has
a somewhat better chance than any one else of becoming chief prophet in
his father's place, he does not succeed to the post as of right without
appointment. Even supposing that all the sons of priests were entitled to
be enrolled in the ranks of the priesthood if they pleased, they did not
necessarily inherit any particular priestly office or emolument, as is proved
by the fact that different members of the same family may be engaged in
the service of different gods and different temples.

The same degree of liberty in the choice of occupation must have

CASTE AND DESCENT. 127

existed also among the common people, or the scribes' rhetorical recom-
mendation of their own profession would have had little meaning ; but
the liberty was comparatively seldom claimed. The criminal Paneba,
already mentioned as having been accused of unlawfully compelling men
and women to work for him, was also charged with embezzling and
damaging building materials destined for the king's work. When accused
of spoiling the unbaked bricks with his footsteps, he professed, as an
excuse for his intrusion, to have " become a mason ; " and though it is
implied that the claim was fraudulent, it is evident from its being made that
it was possible for a change of calling to be effected with certain formali-
ties and due publicity.

The statement of the Greeks 1 that all Egyptians were obliged to give
in their names in writing to the governors of their provinces, showing by
what means they get their living, is no doubt in the main accurate. In
Egypt, as also in China, the registration of all the inhabitants in their pro-
fessions and callings was carried out, partly at least, in view of the public
charges to which they might be liable. The list of all servants and
officials by name demanded in the papyrus quoted above, shows that
such enumerations were common ; and the lists of cultivators kept in the
temple registers were so complete and circumstantial as to serve in lieu of
title deeds for land ; that is to say, the peasant who was entered as occupy-
ing a particular plot — and consequently liable for such and such dues to
the king and the god — had his lawful occupancy thereby officially recorded,
and this record was accepted as proof of ownership so long as no other
name took his place on the register.

To escape paying land tax, a man had to show that he was engaged in
some other pursuit, which he was required to specify. A man officially
registered as belonging to one trade, and then found exercising another,
was clearly guilty of having given false information to the authorities, an
offence not likely to be committed without some further evil intent ; and
the punishment of this offence probably led the Greeks to believe that it
was against the law to exercise more than one trade at a time, or for a
tradesman to meddle in civil affairs, which would be an encroachment on
the work of the literary class.

Though hereditary professions were the rule, there were regular and
legitimate ways of making exception to them. Thus, in the case of a
family of choachytes, whose archives, extending from the seventh cen-
tury B.C. to the Roman occupation, have been preserved,2 we learn that
on one occasion, out of several children, one was adopted by a tax-
collector, whose heir he became ; in consequence of which he renounced
formally all claims on "the property of his own family, acquired in the
calling he was about to abandon in favour of his new inheritance. The
occupation and the estate of the tax-collector go together as a matter of
course, just as the occupation of temple priest goes with the possession
of a prescribed share of the temple offerings.

1 Herod., ii. 177. Diod., i. 77. ' Cours de droit £gyptien, i. 136, 147.

128 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

A strict theory of caste would have been impossible in Egypt owing to
another characteristic of the people pointed out by Erman : l they were
singularly destitute of the taste or feeling for genealogies ; they have no
surnames, and though every man while alive wishes his name to live for
ever, as a matter of fact even grandfathers are seldom commemorated by
their descendants, and remoter ancestors are ignored in all but a few
exceptional cases where the transmission of property or office has been
continuous. If the Egyptians had prided themselves on ancient lineage
or long descent,, they would not have failed to let us know what they had
to boast of in that respect ; and considering the strength of family affec-
tion and the theoretical reverence due to ancestors, it is almost certain
that, had families, in our sense of the word, been long lived, they would
have learnt to value themselves upon the quality. If they do not do so,
it must have been because families died out rapidly, a fact which the
marriage customs of the people are sufficient to explain.

1 Vol. i. p. 228.

CHAPTER V.

THE MILITARY CLASS.

THE advocates of the existence of Caste in Egypt are also predisposed to
believe that the priestly and military castes, as such, were the chief or only
landed proprietors, in addition to the king himself; and the accounts given
by Herodotus and Diodorus of the military administration of " Sesostris "
are received with less than the usual scepticism of modern critics, because
they seem to harmonise with this view, which is really only suggested by
them. There is, however, nothing in the monuments of the first twenty
dynasties to suggest, and very little to confirm, such an opinion ; and though
it has the support of so eminent an authority as M. Revillout, it did not
originate with him, nor indeed with any professed Egyptologist; and there-
fore the degree of credit which it has obtained among such scholars is less
convincing than it would be, if the theory had been based on the monu-
ments and confirmed by the Greeks. If the Greeks are really the chief
authorities for the ownership of land by the castes, their evidence can
only be conclusive for their own times, and even then it will require to be
interpreted by the light of what we know about the spirit of Egyptian
civilization and institutions ; which M. Revillout himself has so well shown
to possess a kind of liberal humanity equally remote from mediaeval
feudalism or Brahminic sacerdotalism.

Both soldiers and priests were ex offitio in possession of certain lands
which they might either occupy or cultivate by deputy in the manner al-
ready described, either through stewards or tenants paying a fixed share
of the produce. That is to say, the soldiers of the standing army, so far
as there was such a thing in Egypt, were partly paid by allotments in
land, in addition to the pay or allowances, which they received when on
active service or on duty in the king's bodyguard. These military lands
would be hereditary in just the same way and to the same extent as the
military calling was hereditary. The son who was a soldier would inherit
his father's plot, and succeed to his place in the ranks ; but during occu-
pancy, the plot would be as much private property as any other land in
Egypt, and would belong to the individual soldier, not to the warrior class.
If the possession lapsed for want of a son, daughter's son, or son-in-law to
succeed to the vacant place, another soldier would undoubtedly receive
the land, as from the king, in the way of wages, not from the army as re-
distributing its corporate property.

i3o OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

At the present day certainly, and most probably always, the army of
China has been paid in exactly this way, which is both the cheapest and
the most popular that can be adopted in a nation of cultivators, where all
the land is still regarded as Crown or national property. The only point
in which there was room for a difference between the soldiery and the com-
mon people, as regarded the tenure of land, was as to the payment of
taxes. As in China and all other primitive agricultural countries, the
principal source of revenue in Egypt was the produce rent or land tax
paid upon all cultivated — which in Egypt meant all irrigated — land. Now
to pay the soldier his wages in land, and then to deduct from those wages
the amount required in taxes from civilians, is a clumsy complication of the
sort more common in modern than in ancient times. There is every
reason to believe that, as Herodotus says, the soldiers' allotments did not
pay land tax • and as it is quite true that, in these ancient States, rent and
land tax are practically indistinguishable, it may be said that the soldiers,
who did not pay rent or land tax, were a step nearer to the absolute owner-
ship of their plots than the civilian cultivators, who were liable for such
payment. This is so far true that, if the soldier chose to sublet to a
cultivator, the latter could afford to pay as rent what he was not called
upon to pay as land tax for this plot, in addition to any proportion of the
produce that a tenant could give to private owners liable for taxes. But
the only real effect of this is to make the soldiers' wages so much more, or
rather to make a given quantity of land go so much farther in paying
them. The condition of the soldier's ownership is his rendering military
services, just as the condition of the cultivator's ownership is his paying
the required land tax ; and supposing the military lots to have been of the
same average size as the ordinary peasant's holding, the exemption from
land tax and campaigning allowances together would probably represent
no more than the value of the soldier's labour, during the time that he
was debarred from working for himself.

Technically, perhaps, there is not much difference between the position
of the Egyptian soldier, who received a grant of land free of tax, in re-
turn for military service, and the feudal tenant, who had a life interest in
his estate under the same condition. The over-lord in mediaeval Europe
more often received his tribute in the form of services than produce ; but
the latter mode of payment was not unknown, and what the feudal tenant
received with his land, in addition to the right of using and abusing it
himself, was the right to levy such taxes from it as the king levied from the
lands which he had not granted away. We give the name of taxation to
the dues exacted by the supreme political authority as such, whether they
are received in the form of services, produce, or money. But the political
effect of a grant, carrying with it the right to levy the land tax, is very
different in different communities. In Egypt land was productive, and
accordingly worth more to cultivate than to tax ; a small quantity was
therefore enough to pay a soldier who might, if he pleased, cultivate it
himself; and estates large enough to bring in a considerable revenue,

THE MILITARY CLASS. 131

from the land tax only, were not granted often enough to allow of the forma-
tion of a large class of landed military aristocrats.1

Ricardo's theory of the origin of rent presupposes a state of society in
which rich men, not possessed of any special political authority enabling
them to levy taxes on their poorer neighbours, are possessed of large
estates in land which they desire to cultivate for profit. Farming by
stewards or agents in the Egyptian manner is not profitable, unless the
khenmes is of unexceptionable probity and skill ; and the alternative of letting
or leasing land to a working farmer is, as Ricardo proved, only open in the
case of land, which is sufficiently productive to yield a profit, after all costs
of cultivation and the cultivator's maintenance have been defrayed. In
England and many other countries in modern times, it is so common for
land to be owned, in large quantities, by persons who desire to derive a
certain amount of profit from it, with the minimum amount of labour or
superintendence, that large quantities of land of all degrees of fertility are
constantly offered to the class of working farmers for a rent. The develop-
ment of other industries in England, and the slow increase of population
where such industries fail, may prevent the competition of farmers for
land from raising rents beyond the limit compatible with their own easy
maintenance ; but the demand for land in most European countries is keen
enough to cause rent to be paid for every degree of productiveness beyond
the minimum.

But this sort of commercial rent is of comparatively late origin, and it is
a matter of some importance in social economics to have it clearly under-
stood, that, in the earliest times, rent was never paid except to the
sovereign, or to some person to whom the sovereign's right of taxation had
been delegated. In other words, the origin of rent is political, not econo-
mical. It is noticeable, however, that this theory of the State ownership
of land seems only able to maintain itself among the non-political races.
Unless the cultivators are regarded as possessing a kind of customary free-
hold, the peasant who failed to pay his taxes would be deprived of his land,
a result which has followed disastrously whenever modern European notions
have been allowed to govern the administration of a subject oriental State.
In ancient Egypt, no doubt, the defaulting taxpayer had to pay with his
person, if not in corn, and had to " eat stick " as a stimulus to greater in-
dustry or thrift ; but his land was not t^ken from him, and he started fair
for the next agricultural year.

Modern economists would tell us that if the arrears of land tax were once
allowed to be cancelled upon inability to pay, all the cultivators would
profess such inability at once ; and this might perhaps be true, if both rulers
and subjects belonged to one of those political races who make long
existence difficult to themselves by their habit of, as the saying is, riding
their ideas to death. The ruler who expects to increase the national
wealth, by depriving any subject of the means of subsistence, is the fellow-

1 In the Twelfth Dynasty a grant of fiye acres was considered reward sufficient for a chief
officer's gallantry in an engagement or a campaign. (Lepsius, Denkmaler, iii. II.)

J32 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT,

countryman of the subject who deliberately adopts a course of conduct,
which has only to be made universal, in order to deprive the Government
of the means of existence, and thereby to expose the whole people to
extermination or enslavement by a foreign conqueror. But this savage
anxiety to press every principle to extremity is unknown and incompre-
hensible to primitive States, and the Pharaoh, therefore, might possess with
impunity powers which, in the hands of the Caesars, would destroy the
country and the monarchy together.

As we have seen, one of the first duties of the king was to provide all
his people with their food ; and when he abandoned to a subject any por-
tion of his royal rights, the rights were accepted subject to all the customary
obligations. The hereditary princes, whose rights were in some cases even
older than the monarchy, governed their own domains just as the king
was expected to rule the whole country. The officers, who received, by
the king's favour, equal or similar powers in any district, seem seldom to
have increased the numbers of the hereditary aristocracy, no doubt be-
cause of the custom which caused the father's property to be divided
between his sons and sons-in-law. But the king was expected to uphold all
ancient hereditary claims, and in the very inscription which is relied on as
confirming the Greek accounts of the soldiers' lands, Rameses II. boasts
of his regard for rights of birth, which would have been fatal to any such
redistribution of the whole country, as is ascribed to him.

When counting up the benefits he had conferred on them, as a reproach
to the nobles who failed him in the day of battle, he says, " I make princes
of you always, I set the son in his father's seat." L But there is no sense
in which it can be maintained that the hereditary princes of Egypt and the
private soldiers, whose lot was ridiculed by the scribes, belonged to the
same class. According to the Greeks, it was this king who instituted both
the system of military allotments and the general division of the land
amongst the cultivators, with the institution of a land tax, payable by
all except priests and soldiers. But the informants of Herodotus, and
very possibly all but the most learned Egyptians of that age, looked upon
Rameses II. as the greatest, and by a natural confusion, as therefore the
first, or nearly so, of their native kings. All events over a thousand years
old appear in the same plane in the eyes of tradition. The builders of the
Pyramids and of the Labyrinth, though really far more ancient, are counted
by Herodotus among the successors of Sesostris ; and as all the historical
knowledge of his informants must have been of the same calibre, all that
the late tradition, which he reproduces, can be trusted for, is the fact that
the allotment system had existed as early as the time of Sesostris ; not that
it was unknown before him.

It had always been the custom of warlike Egyptian kings to include
among their troops any of the neighbouring barbarians who were willing to
take service under their banners ; and the prudence of the course was self-

1 Poem of Pentaur, Brugsch, Hist., ii. 58. Records, ii. 65 ff.

THE MILITARY CLASS. 133

evident, since, for instance, if the warriors of the Nine Bows l were fighting
for Egypt against the Asiatics, they could not at the same time be plunder-
ing the southern frontier, left exposed during operations at the opposite
extremity of the kingdom. Such auxiliaries, when not on active service, no
doubt returned to their homes, and this part of the army therefore would
not need to be paid by allotments of land. Rameses II. seems to have
employed mercenaries of this type quite as readily as any of his prede-
cessors ; and if he had also reorganized the native army in some new way,
accentuating the difference between the native and foreign troops, it is
scarcely possible but that some indication of the fact should have been
given in his inscriptions.

In the poem of Pentaur, the king says to the soldiers, chariotmen, and
princes, who had taken no part in the great fight, where he overthrew the
" miserable king of the Khita : " " No Pharaoh has done for his people what
I have done for you. I allowed you to remain in your villages and in your
towns. Neither the captain nor his chariot horses did any work." There is
nothing in this to show that the king had bestowed any kind of endowment
on the warriors in his service ; he only treated them more leniently and
liberally than former kings. In consideration, most probably, of their
being called on to follow him on his repeated campaigns in foreign parts,
he may have refrained from calling them out, in time of peace, either for
parade or labour ; and he even carried consideration so far as to instruct
each detachment by which route it might proceed direct to the seat of
war, instead of marching first to a central camp or muster ground. We
may also argue that the land allotted to a captain was sufficient for his
support, without his having to cultivate it in person, and that Rameses
did not, like the Mongol emperors of China, allow the maintenance of his
war horses to become the occasion of oppressive and unpopular exactions.

But there is nothing in all this to show the existence of an independent
warrior caste, exercising suzerainty over a third portion of the land of
Egypt. The soldiers, who remained in their villages and in their towns,
treated their holdings as private property, though they might no doubt, if
the king pleased, be called upon to give up their plot in one province and
accept an equivalent somewhere else. But as the inundation practically
reduced every cultivator to a yearly tenancy, this was not a serious hard-
ship. On the other hand, under a feeble or unwarlike prince, the soldiers
would be seldom called on, and, in a generation or two, their families
would become indistinguishable from the ordinary, unwarlike peasantry.
The tradition would remain, that such and such lands were the soldiers'
portion; but if, at. any time, the fiscal authority chose to claim them, as
liable for land tax, the civilian descendants of old soldiers would at that
price obtain a legal title as private owners. Only so long as the land re-
mained exempt, its occupiers would be liable, on the accession of a fighting
Pharaoh, who wished to reconstruct his army, to be called out again to
re-acquire their fathers' art.
1 Cf. Asien imd Enropa nach Altagyptischen Denkmdlern, p. 13. W. Max Muller, 1893.

134 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

The native troops were always more of a militia than an army, and the
employment of a real standing army of Greek mercenaries only began
when the army had been so long enfeebled, that the militia had ceased to
exist, and ambitious kings lacked the patience to revive the extinct military
spirit of their people. If the soldiers' land had belonged to a warrior caste
collectively, a quite different kind of abuse would have arisen whenever
the army was disregarded by the king. The caste would have been care-
ful not to fill up vacancies in its ranks, and so, while the number of
soldiers decreased, they would grow richer in proportion to their numbers,
and so become formidable collectively as the priesthood actually did.

As a matter of fact, this did not occur ; on the contrary, when Amasis
began to employ Greek mercenaries, he seized and allotted to their use
some of the temple lands at Memphis, Heliopolis, and Bubastis.1 This
measure, to which pious patriots attributed the future calamities of the
country, would have been unnecessary as well as impolitic if the so-called
soldiers' lands had been sufficient for the support of his troops, since, even
including the foreign mercenaries, these can scarcely have exceeded the
armies of the great Rameses or Thothmes. If the proportion of military
lands had been reduced, through the gradual return of the native militia to
the ranks of the cultivators, a king who wished to settle a fresh body of
troops, drawn from without upon Egyptian lands, could only do so by dis-
possessing the existing proprietors. Under Ptolemy Philopator a middle
course was tried. The mercenaries were settled upon temple lands, but
they were required to pay a fixed contribution in corn to the temple, which
could hardly be regarded as an act of spoliation, if the amount paid by
them was equal to the ancient customary tithe.

The revolt of the Egyptians in this reign 2 was probably due to an alli-
ance of the sacerdotal and military interests, which for the moment were
strong enough to resist, though not strong enough to have escaped, oppres-
sion. According to Polybius, Ptolemy's success in the war with Antiochus
was due to his advisers having reorganized the Egyptian army, the native
troops, which formed about half its number, being drilled and commanded
by Greek officers. The military spirit and capacity of the Egyptian troops
was thus revived ; but as they had to be paid or maintained, as well as the
foreign mercenaries, it is probable that the maintenance of the latter was
thrown principally upon the sacred lands. Mere jealousy of the foreigners
would not by itself have provoked a military revolt, for it was no hardship
to an Egyptian soldier to return to the ranks of the tax-paying peasantry ;
but with the army ready for action, and the priests no longer on the side
of the Government, but instigating revolt as a pious and patriotic duty,
there were materials for a formidable outbreak, which, though it was sup-
pressed after a time, had the effect of warning the rulers to show more
respect for native customs and prejudices.

1 E. Revillout, Les Obligations en droit Egypticn, p. n ; and the same author's trans-
lation of a Demotic chronicle, Revue Egyptologique, i. p. 57.

2 Rev. Egypt., 1882, p. 115.

THE MILITARY CLASS. 135

The two documents which throw most light upon the position and
character of the Egyptian soldiery, though belonging to very distant dates,
have so much in common and are so obviously inspired by the same theory
of government, that we can scarcely be misled by considering them to-
gether. One of these is a letter, referring to an unknown Edict of Agri-
culture, addressed by a certain Herodius of Alexandria to his subordinates,
some time in the second century B.C., most probably in the first half of it,1
and warning them against giving any occasion to such complaints as had
recently been made to the Government, respecting unjust and oppressive
exactions on the part of the revenue officers or tax collectors. The other
is a similar edict by Horem-hib, the predecessor of Rameses L, a soldier
king who claimed to have restored peace and order to Egypt, after the
troubled sway of the heretic kings, who intervene between the great
monarchs of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties.

The earlier of these documents only mentions the soldiers incidentally,
as consisting of two classes, respectively connected, like everything else in
Egypt, with the division of the country into the northern and the southern
land ; and as adding to the troubles of the country people by their thefts,
instead of employing themselves industriously in their settlements.2

The particular form of robbery, of which the private soldiers are accused
by the king, is that of seizing forcibly the hides of cattle, in the possession
of the peasantry, bearing the stamp or brand of the king. That this should
be a possible or tempting crime proves that the system of boarding out the
royal herds was managed in Egypt, much as it was thousands of years later
in Ireland and Tatary. The "giving" or "taking" stock was the note
of feudal superiority or dependence according to the Brehon laws. The
chief was the person who had cattle to spare, when land was to be had by
any one, and the tenant was required to " take stock," that is, to herd and
pay rent for the cattle of his lord.

The Senchus Mor* lays down that "If the cattle given as stock are
alive when they (the chief and the tenant) separate, they must be re-
stored to him in the condition in which they are, be they ever so poor,
for they may have been wasted by age and service ; " but if they are dead
they are to be replaced by others, equal in value to the first, unless they
died of some disease which had attacked them before the tenancy began.4
The kind of abuse to which this arrangement is liable is well described by
Father Hue :6 " The Tartars who are not of princely family are slaves, living
under the absolute control of their masters. In addition to the dues which
they are required to pay, they have to keep the herds of their masters. . . ."

1 This document, known as Pap. 63 of the Louvre collection, is translated by Lumbroso
in the Transactions of the Royal Scientific Academy of Turin for 1870, v. 207. The
version of the great decree ot Horem-hib, published by Dr. W. Max Miiller in the
Zeitschrijt pir sEgyptischen Sprache und Althertkumskunde for August, 1888, is not put
forward as final, but little doubt seems to attach to the sense of the portions relied on in
the text.

2 The significance of this last clause is not quite certain.

3 Ancient La*ws of Ireland, vol. ii. p. 315. 4 Cf. Exod. xxii. v. 10-13.
5 Voyage dans la Tartarie, vol. i. p. 273 ff.

136 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

The slaves may have property of their own, are often richer than their
masters, and meet them on a footing of social equality, but " some of the
Tartar sovereigns abuse their supposed rights to oppress their people and
demand exorbitant tribute. And we have met with one who exercises a
really revolting system of oppression. He chooses from his flocks the sheep,
oxen, camels, and horses which are oldest and sickliest, and gives the care
of them to his wealthiest retainers. The latter cannot object to taking the
herds of their sovereign lord to pasture ; indeed, it is regarded as an honour
to do so" (as in Ireland the tenant's rank depended on the terms upon
which he " took stock "). " But after a few years the king asks to have his
animals back, and as they are nearly all dead of old age or sickness, he
chooses the youngest and finest animals from the flocks and herds of his
tenant; and not content with that, will ask for double or triple the original
number, on the plea that they must have increased and multiplied." The
existence of a corresponding abuse in Ireland has enriched the vocabu-
lary of operatives in the sister island with the expression " to work for
a dead horse," which is still used for the working out of an unprofitable
job, or by sailors, who are supposed to have received in advance the
money for work still due.1

In Egypt the system was apparently regulated so as to obviate all just
ground of complaint. The royal cattle were branded with some durable
mark before being entrusted to their keepers ; if they died the keeper was
bound to produce the stamped hide, as a proof that the animal was really
dead, such hide being at the same time, accepted as a discharge of the
keeper's liability, and probably as a voucher for his claim to receive
another animal in charge in its place. The keeper who was unable to
produce the hide was liable to be required to replace the animal at his
own expense, and the oppression of the soldiers, who are said to have
gone about "robbing and beating/' probably took the form of stealing the
hides and then compelling the peasants to redeem them. They might of
course also have kept the hides and delivered them to the overseer of the
royal herds ; but it is scarcely likely that any payment was made in such
cases by the Crown, and to landless men, like the military brigands, the
prospect of receiving the charge of other royal cattle in lieu of the returned
hides would not be attractive.

The royal edict declares that all such thieves are to be deprived of the
hides they have stolen, and to receive one hundred blows ; and the royal
overseer, in making his arrangements for the farming of the herds through-
out the country, is exhorted apparently to consider the misery of those
who have been robbed in this way, and to excuse the absence of the
hides.2 Besides the unofficial robberies committed by the soldiers, the
king refers also to complaints which have reached him concerning the
exactions of officers employed in collecting the revenue ; boatmen were

1 Wakefield mentions the expression as an Irish one.

2 M. Maspero's account (Mamtel, p. 318) of the regulations concerning the animals on
the State domains of modern Egypt is almost identical with those above described.

THE MILITARY CLASS. 137

robbed of the boats, by means of which they could render the services
required of them by the king, whereas those who were without boats
should rather have been provided with them for that purpose ; the contri-
butions in kind collected by the taxpayers were seized by the officials for
themselves, and the demand for the tax presented again ; those who had
been robbed were required nevertheless to pay their taxes, and employers
of labour saw their slaves carried off to cultivate the private lands of their
oppressors ; even the townspeople had to complain of excessive imposi-
tions in the form of house tax.

Of all these abuses Pharaoh intends to make an end ; "the holy Fathers
and Prophets of the temples, the Officers of the court and the Priests of the
gods," who form the official class, are warned of the king's will, and that
judgment will be executed upon the heads or noses of all who disregard it.
Searching journeys of inspection will be undertaken, perhaps even by the
king himself, or at any rate by his censors, as in the time of King
Thothmes III., to see that his commands are carried out. It is expressly
stated to be the royal wish that taxes shall not be demanded from those
who possess nothing.

This edict resembles the proclamations of Chinese emperors, against
abuses in their own government, by the homely details which abound in it,
and the air of, as it were, taking his subjects into his confidence which
characterizes the royal remonstrance. It gives direct evidence as to the
kind of abuses which prevailed, when the government of the country was
not at its best, and it shows us the king defending his people against bad
officers, as an alternative picture to that, which is a favourite in ancient
Chinese story, of the virtuous official endeavouring to control the wicked
king. But its importance as bearing on the position of the military class
is also very great.

The common people suffer at the hands of both civil and military
officials; but, while the soldiers commit their crimes on a small scale, as it
were in their private and personal capacity, the real bureaucracy of priestly
rank does its oppressions publicly and officially. The soldiers' exactions
are like the plunder seized by discharged free lances, on their way from
one employer to another in mediaeval Europe, rather than the authorized
exactions of a feudal superior. It may therefore be taken as certain that
immediately before the Ramessid period, the military class were as far
from forming a privileged landed aristocracy as they were later, after the
fall of the last native dynasty. Viewed in the light of their condition
before and after the military reforms or innovations of Rameses II., the
Greek accounts of the provision made for the soldiers by that king may be
understood to indicate only that the army was reconsolidated, and that all
soldiers not employed on active service or in the king's bodyguard — in
other words, all who were not receiving rations for their maintenance —
were settled upon plots of land sufficient for the support of their families.

It is not in accordance with what we know of the stability of Egyptian
institutions, to suppose that, for a few hundred years, in the latter period

138 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

of the monarchy, the overlordship of the country was divided between
three privileged estates, while no trace of such a division existed before or
afterwards. And in fact contemporary documents show that the soldiery
enjoyed no such exceptional rights or privileges as have been ascribed to
them. Under Rameses III., when, if the Greeks were right, the military
caste would have been in the first bloom of its new honours and endow-
ments, the praises of learning by the scribes were apt to take the form of
tirades against the evil lot of those who sought their fortune with the
sword instead of the pen. It seems almost as if the campaigns of the
great king had caused a reactionary distaste for military life and glory, and
the role of the scribe is exalted over that of the foot soldier, or even that
of the cavalry officer, as it was formerly over the pursuits of private indus-
try. The hardships undergone by the foot soldier exceed those of the
agricultural labourer: he is beaten "like a papyrus roll;" his armour galls
him, and the wounds from it fester ; he has to carry his rations like an ass;
if he falls sick he is robbed ; he trembles like a goose in the presence of
the enemy ; when he returns home he is no better than a worm-eaten
stake. Even the officer is liable to be thrown flat on the ground to receive
one hundred blows, though his education at a military college has cost his
family two out of their five slaves.1

This account of the soldiers' fortunes under the most warlike kings of
the new empire harmonises alike with what we have learnt from the edict
of Horem-hib, as to their conduct in times of disorder, and with the recog-
nition of their grievances in the letter of Herodius. The writer begins by
stating that among his chosen warriors in the garrison of Alexandria, the
infantry, the cavalry or charioteers, and the marines, there are complaints
that they are vexed by officers who do not understand the spirit of the
Edict on Agriculture.

Apparently a capitation tax, at three different rates, was paid by different
classes, and the complaint was, partly, that the lesser or second capitation
was exacted from those who should have paid the least or third ; while some
who should have been altogether exempt were required to give the amount
of the lowest capitation in work. The letter is intended to serve all
officers as a guide in levying the assessment. They are to be sworn to use
all diligence in having the land sown, but are to beware of either favouritism
or oppression; no one is to be vexed, and no one unjustly dispensed
from payment. Giving a childish interpretation to the edict, the officials
have required persons in towns, wholly employed upon the liturgies, to
perform agricultural tasks, together with those who were simply unable to
do so ; whereas it was never intended that the capitation fixed by the edict
should be imposed upon all the inhabitants without exception. Those
who contribute to the revenue in fish, or by other produce paid in kind,
of course are not required to pay the ordinary dues over again like the
rest ; neither are the mass of citizens, whose labour barely suffices for their
needs.

1 Maspero, Hist. (Germ, tr.), p. 266. Erman, sEg.> ii. p. 722.

THE MILITARY CLASS. 139

Similar exemption is extended to those on the rolls of the army, who
have only their pay to live on, and apparently to those of the warriors who,
instead of living on their own lands, have to borrow and pay a high rate of
interest (or rent ? ). The capitation assigned in the edict is not to be
levied on all, but those who can pay are not to pay less than is laid down
in it. Those who can work and do not wish to do so are to be compelled,
but not those who are unable. The unfortunate multitudes, soldiers and
others, are to be spared, and any who corruptly or tyrannically strive to
force work from them are to be arrested and delivered up for punishment.
The edict demands services from those who can, not from those who
cannot work.

This document belongs to the period of conciliation, after the Egyptian
revolt and the concessions by which, according to the Rosetta stone,
Ptolemy Epiphanes re-established the state of things existing in the first
years of his father. It is therefore naturally old-Egyptian in spirit. The
officer to whom the letter is addressed is described as Curator of the Low-
lands of Sais. Mention is made, as of a sort of council, of the Strategi,
the Commandants of the guards, the officers of finance, the royal scribes,
the scribe of the warriors and the scribes of the rural districts and of the
towns;1 and these scribes, between them, are required to see to the due
enforcement of the Edict and its commentary.

The letter goes on to explain that, if all due arrangements are made,
little land will be left uncultivated, and that little will be allotted as pasture
to those still in need of State assistance. The military and the cultivators
of the exempt, the Royal and the Sacred lands may also be allowed this
privilege, which is to be enjoyed in rotation by those whose services in
sowing the ground have been accepted. Apparently it was customary to
turn flocks of some kind of animals — if not, as Herodotus says, of pigs —
upon the arable ground to trample in the grain, and that such flocks were
to be allowed free grazing upon the uncultivated lands in return. If this
is done, Herodius goes on to explain, those who have animals to spare will
offer their services willingly, seeing that they will have an appropriate
reward. The document ends with a warning against any molestation of
the city people under cover of pretexts about the Edict.

The letter mentions and distinguishes, besides the lands of the soldiers,
the priests, and the king, the land which is exempted (from taxation), and
the "remaining land," Xoi-n-rjv Trao-av ; and it does not contain a single phrase
implying that the three first classes represent the whole of the cultivated
and inhabited country. The classification used is suggested by the
methods of the internal administration, and is primarily of course connected
with the department of revenue or finance. The scribe of the soldiers,
the scribe of the king, and the scribe of the settled inhabitants kept

1 The topogrammats registered the cultivated lands and the komogrammats the towns
and inhabited houses ; both were scribes belonging to the lowest sacerdotal class. They
retained their functions under the Romans and the Arabs, and even now the surveyors
and Government clerks employed in connection with the land revenue are mostly Copts.
(Revue Egyptologique, 1887, p. 37.)

1 40 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

respectively the records of each class, so that lawful dues and lawful
exemptions might in all cases be received and granted.

The priests of course kept their own records and registers ; but the
registration of the third class of inhabitants, not residing on royal, military,
or sacred domains, proves conclusively that the whole land was not divided
between these three estates. In a sense the whole country belonged to
the king, who could delegate his royal rights over any part of it if he
pleased ; but the royal domains, in the special sense, include only what
the king used and occupied as private property — land of which he received
the produce after maintaining his servants — as distinct from the fields
occupied by the settled inhabitants of different degrees and callings, who
were to all intents and purposes the owners of the holdings, for which
they paid land tax or quit rent to their own proper scribe. Upon the
"remaining land," which must have been larger in quantity than that
assigned to any one other class, if not larger than all together, the settled
inhabitants must always have resided.

A word which occurs in the inscription of Amten, l and must therefore
denote some form of holding dating from the ancient monarchy, is inter-
preted by Brugsch as a measure of land, possibly the aroura. This word
is ahouit, with which are associated ahu, the court or enclosure of an old
Egyptian king, and ahou'iti, the holder of the ahouit. Amten is styled2
haqou ahou'it, chief or regent of the ahouit ; and M. Maspero conjectures
that this may represent an office akin to that of the moultezim, or farmer
of the taxes, in Turkish Egypt, who pays a lump sum to the treasury on
account of taxes, and gets and keeps as much more as he can. It seems,
however, more in accordance with the primitive Egyptian theory of good
government that such a regency should be exercised disinterestedly, and
this may have been the case, without detracting from the importance of M.
Maspero's illustrations and their value as a clue to the primitive systems of
tenure and cultivation in Egypt.

The antiquity of the term, used to denote, at once, a plot of ground of
standard size and its cultivator, seems to show — what is intrinsically
probable — that the country at large was occupied by such cultivators,
subject to a land tax, or rent in kind, paid to the sovereign or some deputy
of his.

A kindred term occurs again in the inscription of Thothmes III., who,
after the victory of Megiddo, divided the cultivated lands depending on
that city into ahouitou, which were measured off by the surveyors of the
royal house, and their harvest gathered in, to the amount of 280,000
measures of corn, besides that which was destroyed by the army. There
are other passages to show that the ahouitou consisted of arable or corn
lands : and the cultivator who tills them is the ahouiti, whose condition is
described in terms making it clear that they form the bulk of the agricul-
tural population — the counterpart of the modern fellahin. The essence

1 Ante, p. 49.

2 Maspero, loc. cit,, p. 329. Brugsch, Hierogl. Diet., Appendix, 124, 7. Hist., p. 1.327.

THE MILITARY CLASS. 141

of sovereignty in Egypt lay in the power of receiving the land tax, and
no further demand was made upon a conquered people than that their
cultivated fields should (at least during the presence of the army of occupa-
tion) pay a corresponding tax to their new lord. And as the native Egypt-
ians could scarcely be worse dealt with than the conquered Syrians, it is
reasonable to suppose that under the Third and the Eighteenth Dynasty,
as well as before and after, the fellahin held the bulk of the cultivable
land, by the custom of the country, as virtual freeholders, subject to the
payment of land and labour taxes.

The cultivation of the land was a duty which the magistrate could exact
from independent cultivators or village communities, just as ancient
Chinese officers were expected to do ; and with the more cogency since it
was by the State administration of the canals and irrigation works that all
land in private occupancy was rendered productive. There is abundant
evidence to show that land not under cultivation was not regarded as
private property : if it had only fallen out of cultivation through bad times
and political disorder, when peace and prosperity were restored, it would
be reclaimed by the heirs of former owners ; and if not so claimed, either
simply appropriated by the first person who chose to bring it again into
cultivation and get himself registered as paying land tax for it, or else
granted by the king, or the temple to whom such tax was payable, to any
peasant willing to occupy it. In China there were always vacant lands
which could be disposed of in this way, whenever a period of disturbance
had created an unsettled destitute class, needing to be provided, by
authority, with the means of subsistence ; and on a smaller scale no doubt
the same operation repeated itself in Egypt.

Just as the cultivators employed upon a private estate would strike work
if underfed or otherwise aggrieved by a tyrannical overseer, the tax-paying
peasantry would desert their lands if bad government rendered their
occupation intolerable. But it is quite contrary to the genius of the
Egyptian constitution for the State to profit by its own wrong, as would
have been the case if such unoccupied lands had been added to the royal
domains. These formed a much larger proportion of the whole country
in Egypt than in China, but in both theory and practice the rights of the
Crown were of the same character.

If it were true that every cultivator was necessarily a tenant or serf,
either of the king, a temple, or a military colony, it is quite certain that the
numerous documents, which mention the common people by name and
calling, would as a matter of course always include that most important
characteristic ; and we should hear of the peasants of the king, the priests,
and the soldiers, as we do of the scribes of those classes. As this is not
the case, we may be sure that the cultivators, like the artisans, formed a
separate class. The royal lands belonged to the king in one sense, the
sacred lands to the priests in another, and the military lands to the soldiers
in a third ; and the virtual freehold enjoyed by the cultivators of the re-
mainder was probably more like real ownership than either.

1 42 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

The difference between the soldiers and the priests was that the former
were in no sense a privileged class ; even under the foreign rulers, whose
mercenary troops were settled in military colonies, occupying collectively
the lands granted them, generally at the expense of some temple, the posi-
tion of the soldiers was still so little better than that of the peasantry,
that, as we have seen, they are mentioned among the persons to be excused
from corvees on the ground of poverty. And we have no reason to
suppose their status to have been inferior to that of the native Egyptian
troops.

The fact is that the natural bent of the people was pacific, and for that
very reason alone they do not magnify or idealize the profession of arms ;
they even depreciate the valour of their soldiery as unduly as other nations
exalt the same quality in their champions. To say nothing of the aggres-
sive campaigns of the greater kings from Senoferu to Sesostris, it is
significant that so fertile a country should have suffered so little from either
the reality or the threat of foreign conquest. The partial conquest of the
so-called Shepherd kings is the only break in over three thousand years of
independence, and this by itself is enough to prove that the national spirit
was neither broken by oppression nor relaxed by luxury. Even as late as
the days of Croesus, the Egyptian troops retained their quality, and they
are mentioned by Xenophon as the only soldiers on his side who success-
fully resisted the Persians ; and in this, as in other respects, two thousand
years more have seen little change in the moral and physical qualities of
the native dwellers by the Nile.

Egyptian private soldiers have faced British fire and steel more gallantly
than could have been expected from undisciplined men without leaders,
and the military qualities which they have displayed under the most
unfavourable circumstances in the Nineteenth Century enable us to credit
the infantry of the Nineteenth Dynasty with, let us say, all the docile
stubbornness which makes a Russian army formidable. Like the Chinese,
the Egyptians are not fond of fighting, but, like them, under patriotic
leaders they are more than a match for all but the most warlike of un-
civilized nations, and are as formidable as these to the representatives of
modern civilization. Under English officers, they develop an enthusiasm
for military drill,1 and are a match for Arabs. The modern Soudanese
love fighting, and have the same curious aptitude as the Ghoorkas for
attaching themselves to British officers and fraternizing with British
privates, so that they are still ideal auxiliaries for an Egyptian ruler.2

The contempt in which the scribes hold the calling of the soldier is, by
itself, an evidence that the army did not rank in popular esteem as a third

1 This at least is nothing new. Amenemheb, a general of Thothmes III., would have
delighted the heart of a German Emperor by his ideal of military efficiency. "Behold,"
he says to the king, as his officers march past in review, " behold the strikers of the
double land. . . . We form a perfect whole, making but one mouth, one arm, one
hand: all the soldiers [keep their rank?] without a single one departing from it."
{Mem. de la Mission Arch, au Caire, v. 2, 221.)

2 England in Egypt, by Alfred Milner, p. 182.

THE MILITARY CLASS. 143

estate of the realm, coeval with the priesthood and sharing with Pharaoh
himself the overlordship of the whole country. The case of China affords
a parallel, which may serve to explain how, even under warlike kings, the
military calling can continue to occupy a subordinate place in the minds
of the ruler and the nation. Both Egypt and China were important
States, nationalities imbued with a strong sense of their own superiority,
and neither unable nor unwilling, if necessary, to secure their own pre-
dominance by force of arms. But the superiority on which they prided
themselves most is mainly intellectual ; and the highly cultivated literary
class, in whom this superiority is strongest, naturally looks down upon the
coarser type of those who meet the barbarians with their own weapons.

CHAPTER VI.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD.

§ i. THE WORSHIP OF ANIMALS AND NATURAL FORCES.

THE caste theory of land tenure is more nearly accurate in what concerns
the priesthood than the soldiery, but even in this case so many qualifica-
tions have to be made, that it seems scarcely worth while to choose such a
term to describe the provision made for the Worship of the gods, the
Commemoration of the dead, and the maintenance of the Priests. All
authorities, from Herodotus to the Pentateuch, agree that the priests en-
joyed some special privileges ; but these did not always take the same
form ; and the earliest endowments or gifts of land for religious purposes
concerning which we have authentic evidence, seem to appertain rather to
tombs than temples, and are destined rather to secure the continued
commemoration of the dead than the worship of the gods or the main-
tenance of the priests employed in such worship.

The religion of Egypt in the earliest ages was much less theological
than afterwards. The primitive religion of Central Asia probably consisted
of a kind of nature worship, associated with, or developing into, a worship
of the "spirits" of real things. This is the religion of the Chinese Classics,,
and to this day no other belief is recognised as orthodox within the Middle
Kingdom, where primitive rationalism still forms the religion of the learned.
Under Semitic influence, the spirits worshipped by the ancient Babylonians
on the one hand grew into or were superseded by gods, and on the other
were degraded into symbols only used to conjure with. In Egypt we find
slight and scattered traces of the worship of spirits connected with the
early simple nature worship, as in China we meet with obscure traces of a
primitive worship of animals. One of the maxims of the scribe Ani
declares that " When the crops in the fields perish, the spirits are earnestly
invoked;"1 and the spirits referred to in this passage can only be those
of " the land and the grain," so frequently appealed to in the Chinese
classics. In another text we read that the good spirits " flood the arable
land yearly, and deliver the waters of the inundation to the back lands;"2
and, if the name of the ancient Alexandrian festival, called "the purifica-
tion of the spirits," and described as a sort of Saturnalia — reproduced the
original Egyptian designation, we may claim that also as a survival of the

1 Maxims of Scribe Ani, 52.

2 Brugsch, Hieroglyphisch-demotisches Worterbuch, vol. vi. p. 476.

7 HE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 145:

prehistoric religion. The sacredness of certain trees l and plants in Egypt
no doubt dates from the same period, as well as the more familiar and
characteristic feature of Egyptian religion, the worship of animals.

The earliest known figures of sacred beasts are cynocephali, found in
the same temple as the statues of King Khafra,2 and there are so few
monuments of any kind earlier than this, that we may fairly assume the
worship of such deities to be as old as any part of the national religion.
Advocates of the African origin of the Egyptians have of course claimed
the prevalence of beast worship amongst them as a fetishistic survival,
though inanimate fetishes are more common than live ones. But if the
Egyptians brought their gods from Babylonia, where the worship of man-
headed bulls, lions, eagles, and the like grew up, all that we should have
to explain would be their preferring to worship the animal portion of the
deity under the figure of a live animal, instead of a mongrel image. What
is called the Totemistic theory would apply the same explanation to Egypt
and Babylon, and assume both the sacred animals and the beast headed
gods to have acquired their sacredness in prehistoric timesy when the
future nations were divided into clans, named after a supposed animal
ancestor. The real question is, whether such theories are necessary to
account for the worship of animals by a civilized and intelligent people ;
since apart from such necessity there is nothing in Egyptian records to
suggest it, so that the fact of different animals being held sacred in
different nomes does not help us to decide why some animals were sacred
in all.

The Egyptians of history were as far removed from savagery as our-
selves, or even chronologically further ; and they might boast that their
civilization, such and so old as it was, was of their own making, while no
one can tell what the barbarians of the West owe to Rome and Greece —
who borrowed their art, their letters, and some glimmerings of forensic
humanity from Egypt and Chaldaea — as well as to Semitic religion, which
again owes much of its morality to the wisdom of the great pre-Semitic
civilizations. The most rational and sensible explanation we can imagine
or invent is not likely, therefore, to be too sensible for the founders of
civilization, and we are almost certain to be wrong in any interpretation
which credits them with more than our own normal share of stupidity.

Primitive man, whether we think of him as an ancient sage or a modern
savage, forms a view of life and nature in accordance with his own con-
ception and experience of both, and these naturally and justifiably differ
very much from ours. In no case is this more true than in all that
concerns his relations with wild and domesticated animals. The distinc-
tion which is now a commonplace, between human reason and the more
or less intelligent instinct of other animals, is no more self-evident than
that between animate and inanimate nature. Some of the things that
" move themselves," as the Egyptian lawyers put it, do so consciously, and

1 Dr. Schweinfurth, I am informed, considers the sacred trees of Egypt to be all natives
of Arabia. 2 Maspero, Egyptian Archeology (Eng. tr.), p. 63.

P.O. L

146 O WNERSHIP IN EG YPT.

others not; some with a recognisable and apparently reasonable purpose,
and others not.

There are many non-human forces in nature, by the action of which
mankind is affected in various ways ; and it would have been rash, rather
than scientific, for the first generation of philosophers, with no records of
other times or places for a guide, to take for granted that human forces
were the only ones open to the influence of human motives. For instance,
if I have built a hut upon a hill and cut down a tall tree by it, and my hut
is shortly struck by lightning, what more rational hypothesis can I frame —
if I am rationalist enough to require some explanation of the fact — than
the obvious one that the thunder is angry when tall trees are felled ?
When one knows nothing, absolutely nothing, about thunder and light-
ning, it is more natural, and on the whole more reasonable, to suppose
that things which speak and move are alive than not ; nor is it puerile to
suppose that other things, like men, mean what they do.

China shows us natural religion in its simplest elements, the worship of
Heaven and Earth, based on the assumption that heaven and earth intend
to enable mankind to grow grain. But the habit of generalizing must have
made some progress before either earth or heaven are thought of as con-
stituting a single, separate agency, and the primitive multiplication of gods
arises from the number of distinct actions for which invisible agents are
consistently imagined. After the recognition of the powers of earth and
of thunderbolt-wielding, earth-shaking, cloud-compelling Weather Gods, the
worship of animals, if dispassionately considered, may be taken to mark a
real development of the theological faculty, in the selection of objects for
more or less disinterested reverence, on the ground of their typifying
human qualities.

The superiority of man to other animals, we must remember, is least
marked while his purposes are most like theirs. If the object is to enjoy
life and obtain needful food, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field
have little reason to envy the featherless biped who struggles for his exist-
ence in their midst. Man on the other hand finds strength and swiftness,
the qualities he most admires in his fellows, far more adorably developed
in the eagle or the bull, the power of destroying enemies in the tiger or
the crocodile, the power of escaping danger in the elephant or the fox,
than in the strongest, swiftest, fiercest, wariest man. Besides his gratitude
to the animals who prove serviceable to his needs, and his respect for
those whose wrath is dangerous, he takes each animal, which displays any
human faculty or tendency in ideal perfection, for the god or an emblem
of the god of the quality in question. No doubt the result is that where
animals are most used, most liked, and most considered, the primitive
Pantheon runs some risk of developing into a menagerie ; but all early
religions are more or less idolatrous, and as idolatries go, the simple
Egyptian worship of animals is not so exceptionally unreasonable that we
need hesitate to accept its existence as an ultimate fact.

Men of a race growing into sturdy civilization are not stupid enough to

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 147

believe seriously that their own great-grandfathers were birds and beasts.
Even savages do not as a rule expect their fetishes to do things contrary
to nature, so far as they know it ; and though the experience of primitive
ages had not traced the limits of natural possibility as clearly as modern
science has done, with the experience of a few thousand years to help it,
yet the ancient Egyptians certainly knew that cats give birth to kittens
and not to men and women. Ancestor worship formed a principal part
of the national religion ; the spirit of a real human ancestor, the thought
or memory of him, which survives in the minds of descendants, is a real
non-human influence, for which a dim religious reverence may naturally
and reasonably be felt. Real beasts and real ancestors have each their
adorable side ; but an imagined brute ancestor does not exercise any real
or natural influence in virtue of the imaginary kinship. If any beast is
regarded as adorable, he will be worshipped on his merits, without the
help of such a fiction; if he is not so regarded, there is no motive for the
feigned ancestry.1

Real proper names, false etymologies, confused traditions, or the pre-
existence of forgotten forms of animal worship may in many cases have
given rise to the idea of a patron brute, which in some states of society
may be transformed into a mythic ancestor; but Totemism, as an explana-
tion of all primitive religion, is open to just the same criticism as philo-
logical Elementalism. It is not probable that the founders of civilization
should have been exclusively pre-occupied with fictions, about either
personified dawns and sunsets or about ancestral beasts ; and so far from
the improbability being established upon positive evidence, our earliest
sources show us something quite different and far more intelligible. We
find men reverencing, first of all the Sun god, — that is to say, the strongest
non-human influence affecting their daily life, — and in the second place
kings, cows, rivers, trees, and a variety of gods, represented with the heads
of animals, and, to all appearance, symbolizing certain spiritual qualities,
which had come to be associated with the animals; just as the dove and
the lamb are accepted as sacred emblems in Christian allegory and decora-
tion. Real animals are not deified ; they are only held sacred, and of the

1 "Respect for the cow," and "loathing for the pig," are said to be the beginning
and end of the religion of a large proportion of the masses, both Hindoo and Mahom-
medan, in India. The sentiment is shared, irrespective of race and religion, in virtue of
its fundamental reasonableness, and certainly owes nothing to Totemism. The Indians
of North America, according to their last and very intelligent interpreter (Pawnee Hero
Stories and Blackfoot Lodge Tales, by Geo. Bond Grinnell), call their patron animal
their "dream," "medicine," or "sacred helper," but do not regard it as an ancestor.
In the case of individuals the choice is a mere matter of chance or fancy, and the origin
of tribal tokens may be of the same character, like that of many "taboos." Cf. Cod-
rington, Melanesians, pp. 31-3. Foods are forbidden if an ancestor is supposed to have
associated them with himself. Thus at one place in the Solomon Islands, the people
would not eat or plant bananas, because, within human memory, an influential native
"prohibited the eating of bananas after his decease, saying that he would be in the
bananas." The older natives would still give his name, and say, " We cannot eat So
and so ; " but later on the explanation would be, "We must not eat our ancestor."
Professor Sayce tells how an Egyptian engineer, not wanting in education or intelligencej
recognised a white cat as his "medicine." (Contemporary Review, Oct., 1893, p. 530.)

148 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

two ways in which an animal may be held sacred to a god, the kindly
Egyptians chose the kindest, and perhaps the most simply rational, though
the rarest, way. That is to say, instead of killing their sacred animals in
honour of the god to whom they were dedicated, they fed them and kept
them alive in his honour.

Animals any way play a large part in the life of primitive man, and
religious ceremonies naturally gather round the most familiar and im-
portant of every day experiences. Just as some races idealized the
business of the feast and the slaughter house, making the death of beasts
symbolize the destruction of evil, and the sacrificial feast a renewal of
human zeal and energy, so Egyptian religion seems to have idealized the
peaceful routine of the farmyard, and turned the feeding of domestic live-
stock into a piece of ritual. They made pets of the cat and the ichneumon,
and as religions take their colour from the secular tendencies of their
professors, the Egyptians provided their gods with endowments for the
support of a group of pet beasts, instead of only temples and human
acolytes.

In historic China there has never been much room to spare for the
lower animals, and we find nothing answering to the Egyptian sentiment
about them. All the more importance therefore attaches to a single
passage in the Li-ki, bearing on the worship of animals, which must be of
really ancient origin, preserved in spite or perhaps because of its having
become entirely unintelligible; as it must have become, not merely before
the compilation of the classic in its present form, but before the time of
any comments on it by authorities of the Chow dynasty, such as survived
traditionally in some cases till the Han period, with which the virtually
continuous stream of commentation begins. In the description of a great
sacrifice made by the son of Heaven, apparently as a sort of harvest
festival, offerings were made to the legendary inventors of the different
grains and arts of husbandry, and to the representatives "of the birds and
the beasts." The text proceeds : " The ancient wise men had appointed
all the agencies, and it was felt necessary to make this return to them.
They met the (representatives of the) cats, because they devoured the rats
and mice (which injured the fruits of the fields), and (those of) the tigers,
because they devoured the (wild) boars (which destroyed them). They
met them and made offerings to them. They offered also to (the ancient
inventors of) the dykes and water channels ; (all these were) provisions
for the husbandry."

The words in brackets are somewhat of the nature of a gloss, but taking
the text in its utmost brevity, it shows that the most utilitarian and
rationalistic of races, according to a tradition, of which its conservatism
guarantees the extreme antiquity, rendered quasi divine honours to cats
and tigers, because they devoured the rats, mice, and boars of the fields.
The worship of human benefactors and remote ancestors, legendary or
historical, exists, together with the worship of birds and beasts, as some-
1 Li-ki, book ix., sect. n. Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxvii. p. 431 ff.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 149

thing quite distinct, and resting on a totally different class of motives.
"All things originate from heaven; man originates from his (great)
ancestor." Therefore a legendary Minister of Agriculture was associated
with heaven in another sacrifice, the purpose of which is described as "an
expression of gratitude to the source (of their prosperity) and a going back
in their thoughts to the beginning (of all being)." The value of this
evidence will be better estimated hereafter, when we have become ac-
quainted with the extreme accuracy and self-consciousness of practical
philosophy in China; but it must be regarded as at least possible, that the
motives of which the Chinese were conscious, as leading them to worship
cats and other animals, may have operated among the Egyptians where
the same result was reached.

The persistence of the trait after its theological foundation had exploded
shows it to have been, to a considerable extent, a matter of temperament.
Herodotus mentions, as one of the national peculiarities, that the
Egyptians had animals to live with them, in other words that they kept
domestic pets ; and according to Lane they are still fond of and kind to
animals, especially in those parts where Prankish influence has been least
felt. Lady Duff Gordon observes : " The sacred animals have all taken
service with Muslim saints, one of whom reigns over crocodiles at
Minyeh."1 According to her, Amon Ra calls himself Mar Girgis (St.
George), and Osiris holds his festivals with the old notoriety at Tauta, in
the Delta, under the name of Seyyid el Bedawee, while cats are every-
where as sacred as ever, and their slaughter regarded with superstitious
horror.2 One woman tried to bury a cat with all the religious rites due to
a Muslim. Another, called " the mother of the cats," used to follow the
Mahmal to Mecca with five or six cats perched on her camel ; and we
catch a glimpse of the same unconscious worship of the goddess Bast in
the middle ages, when the famous Sultan Ez-zahir Beybars, who ascended
the throne of Egypt in 1260 A.D., bequeathed a garden for the benefit of
the cats, who, down to the present century, were fed in Cairo at the
expense of the Kadi.

Favourite animals, as well as dear friends and trusted servants, are repre
sented in the tombs of the ancient monarchy, and were thus evidently
counted among the precious things of life, without which existence was
scarcely to be conceived or desired. Khafra-ankh is accompanied by a
dog,3 and in some of the tombs gazelles and even hyaenas are represented
as domesticated. The wall pictures in the tomb of a king of the Eleventh
Dynasty show us his favourite dog and six others-, by name, perhaps those
who enjoyed in succession the place of favourite, since even the ancient

1 Letters from Egypt, p. 94, 5. A little above Tahta, Sheikh Heredi, a miracle-
working serpent (who, to the knowledge of European travellers, has been worshipped
continuously since 1714), represents the healing serpent god or Agathodaemon of ancient
Egypt. And fire-breathing and flying serpents, like those of the Theban tombs, are still
believed in by all classes. (Contemporary Review, loc. cit. Cf. also Maspero, Revue de
fhistoire des Religions^ xix. 5. )

2 Last Letters, p. 90.

8 Denkmaler, ii. 9, u, 36, etc.

150 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

Egyptians must have been subject to the same curse as other dog lovers,
in having to transfer their affections several times in their life from one
four-footed friend to another. The ichneumon, which preceded the cat
as a domestic scarer of vermin, evidently did not possess the same indi-
viduality as the dog, but its little tricks were regarded with complacency,
and it is often to be seen in the pictures, either climbing up a lotus stalk,
which bends with its weight, after a bowl of milk, or in other graceful or
comic attitudes.

Horses are not represented on the monuments of either the ancient or
the Middle Empire, and they are consequently not sacred to any god ; but
the personal regard evidently felt for them, even by Pharaoh himself, is an
additional proof that the Egyptians had made considerable progress to-
wards the modern refinement of feeling which recognises the lower animals
as fellow creatures. The laureate of Rameses II. has immortalised his
pair of chariot horses, " Victory in Thebes " and " Mut is satisfied," who
alone with Menna the charioteer, stood by him in his great battle with the
hosts of the Khita. " I will let them eat corn before Ra daily, when I
am in my royal palace," says the grateful king,1 and the recognition of the
individuality of the steeds seems to imply that they will recognise the
honour done them. And one is tempted to recognise something of the
same feeling for the horse as a companion, rather than the mere complaint
of an injured stock owner, in the inscription of Piankhi, which expresses
his sentiments on discovering that a certain Nimrod, king of Hermopolis,
had allowed the foals and horses in the royal stables to starve. " By my
life, so may Ralove me, it is a viler thing to my heart to let the horses starve
than all the other faults which thou hast committed."2

Each nome had a god of its own,3 and at first, perhaps independently, a
sacred animal, which, as the old nature worship was superseded or over-
grown by a mystical theology, came to be regarded as an emblem of the
god, or at least as sacred to him. The principal figures in the pantheon
appear in several districts ; thus the goddess Hathor (the cow-headed) is
the patroness of five nomes, Amon Ra was reverenced in four, Khnum and
Horus in three, Thoth and Anubis in two. To love the king and the god
of his nome was among the virtues men claimed in their self-inscribed
epitaphs.

The endowment of the gods and the sacred animals naturally followed
the same lines, and we have only given precedence to the case of the
animals, because this side of the national worship seems to connect itself
with that earlier stage of religious belief, in which endowments were non-
existent and unnecessary. The worship of the Nile as a god belongs to
the same group or cycle of religious ideas. There were two chief festivals
connected with the inundation, one held when the river was supposed to

1 Brugsch///z>/., ii. 60. Records, ii. 75.

2 Records, ii. 91. Chabas, Choix de textes Egyptiens, p. 47.

3 The great Harris papyrus describes fourteen deities, among those to whom gifts were
made, as the gods of particular cities.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 151

come forth from his two chasms, i.e. to begin to rise, and the other when
the inundation reached Khenmut or Gebel Silsileh. The " laying aside
of the Nile book " 1 was also an epoch to be noted, and probably marked
the end of the rising, when there was nothing more to register, or perhaps
rather the end of the subsidence, when it was apparent which lands had
received a share of the waters. The close connection between the great
river, agriculture, and the welfare of the State, was fully recognised and
exalted into the position of a religious truth.

In a hymn to the Nile of the reign of Minephtah, in the Nineteenth
Dynasty, the solidarity of heaven and earth is acknowledged with quite
primitive simplicity : " He (the river) produceth grass for the oxen, provid-
ing victims for every god ; " and again : " Giving life to men by his oxen,
giving life to his oxen by the pastures, shine forth in thy glory, O Nile ! "
The life of men and the worship of the gods alike depend upon the fruit-
fulness of nature, but it is the adorable fruitfulness of nature that first
suggests to man that the spirits of the natural world are at once beneficent
and uncontrollable, or in other words, divine. Another hymn to the Nile,
of the reign of Rameses II., is a serious idealization of the divine fertilizing
influences of nature : "all teeth get food" by their help ; the poor work
and enjoy abundance, the rich rejoice in the common weal and worship
the invisible, unportrayed divinity. " The householders are satiated with
good things; the poor man laughs at the lotus " 2 — which he is obliged to
gather for food in time of scarcity. Wiser in this than some of our modern
economists, the Egyptians knew that comfort and industry went together ;
and so it is said of the River, thus recognised as the dispenser of abundance :
"idle hands he loathes ;" and again in the Ritual : " Ra, the giver of food,
destroys all place for idleness."

Agriculture evidently owes some of its sacredness to the kind of partner-
ship which exists in it between man and the powers of nature. A solemnity
of feeling attached to all the rites of cultivation, which may be measured
by the extent to which images are drawn from them, to illustrate the con-
dition of the elect souls in the fields of Hades. " Take the cord, draw,
measure, in the fields of the Manes. . . . Ra creates your fields and
appoints you your food, eat ! . . . Ra says to them : Holiness to you
cultivators, who are the lords of the cord in the Amenti ! Oh, settle some
fields and give to the gods and the elect, all of them what has been
measured in the country of Aahu." 3 Elsewhere in the Ritual, the deceased,
in the character of Horus, describes the filial services he has rendered to
his father Osiris : "I have worked the fields for thee, I have filled the wells
for thee, I have hewn the ruts (? canals), I have supplied thee with water,
I have drilled the holes for thee. I have made thy bread from Tu of red

1 Records, x. 41.

2 Records, iv. 107 ff. Records, N.S., iii. 48 ff.

3 Records, x. 79. Cf. Pierret, Livre des Marts, i. 22 ; vi. 3 ; xii. 2 ; xviii. 21 ; Ixiv. 23 ;
cxx. 2 ; cxxix. 9. The last passage is very interesting : " Writings are with thee which
show the proportions of the field sown with corn from its beginning to its end ; " i.e. in
Egypt, as in Babylonia, land was measured for sale by the corn used in sowing it.

152 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

corn, I have made thy drink " (the native beer still used by the Nile boat-
men, the " barley wine " of Herodotus) " from Tepu of white corn. I have
ploughed for thee in the fields of the Aahu, I have mown it for thee
there." The "Feast of Hoeing " mentioned in the first chapter1 shows
similar associations, and probably refers to some ceremony akin to that by
which the kings of China pay their worship to heaven and earth.

Harvest festivals belong to the natural religion of every race and nation,
and the dedication of the firstfruits, which we find to have been an estab-
lished institution in the Thirteenth Dynasty, was most likely associated
with such celebrations from a very early date. But undoubtedly the first
branch of Egyptian religion to become associated with proprietary ideas
was, as already stated, that which also constitutes the leading feature of
Chinese religion, namely the worship of the spirits or manes of deceased
ancestors ; and the endowments, afterwards devoted to the worship of the
gods, seem to have followed the precedents set in the first instance for the
maintenance of purely domestic rites.

§ 2. THE WORSHIP OF ANCESTORS AND PROPERTY IN TOMBS.

Egyptian kings were naturally the first persons to have their memory
honoured and preserved by posthumous worship. Ancient inscriptions
mention a " Priest of King Sent" (Second Dynasty), and a " Priest of the
temple of Nebka " (Third Dynasty) ; and one of the earliest surviving
monuments is that of Amten, an officer of Senoferu, who had charge of
the tomb of that king's mother. A little later, we find Khafra-ankh, de-
scribed as priest of the Pyramid of Khafra, while in private tombs of the
same (Fourth) Dynasty the wall pictures represent servants, presenting to
the deceased the produce of " the northern lands of the tomb " or the
"domains of the tomb;" or sons and scribes, making out an account of
the tribute " brought from the domains of the eternal dwelling-place."

These inscriptions, which recur throughout the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties,
seem to enumerate the estates set apart to provide the funeral offerings to
the spirit of the departed; but as, in later times, the dedication of lands to
spiritual uses did not involve more than the surrender of a tithe of the
produce, we are not obliged to suppose that the enormous number of
cattle and produce of all kinds indicated in the wall pictures were to be
devoted exclusively to such a purpose; indeed, had this been so, the
service of the dead would in a few generations have absorbed all the
wealth of the living. But except in the case of kings, ancestor worship is
seldom kept up with much real piety for more than a generation or two.
The more anxious a dutiful son is to honour the memory of his deceased
father, the less zeal he has to spare for rites in honour of that father's
grandparents. Besides, whatever may have been the effect of assigning
lands to the eternal house, the same lands could not be reassigned in-
definitely in successive generations, since ancestors multiply even more

1 M. Renouf's translation, P.S.B.A. (Mar. 1892), p. 214.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 153

certainly than descendants. The inscriptions prove the existence of a time
when funeral sacrifices on a large scale were offered to the manes of the
rich, but the lavishness of the pictured offerings suggests a doubt as to
their reality ; and, on the whole, the most probable theory is that the cattle,
birds, fruit, bread, wine, and provisions represented in the pictures were
intended to be a substitute for the real objects.

In China, within historical times, it was common for valuables to be
buried with the dead or destroyed in their honour at the funeral, and it
was only after such expenditure had become so burdensome as to be
restrained by law, that the quaint economy of burning paper representations
of money and other valuables came into use. Herodotus describes the
resort to a similar expedient in Egypt, at the feast of the moon, when
those who were too poor to provide the customary sacrifice of a pig, baked
pigs of dough and offered them instead ; and there is therefore nothing
improbable in supposing a similar economy to have been exercised in
relation to the deceased.

When we make the acquaintance of the Egyptians, the art of preserving
the bodies of the dead was still of such recent invention, that the title of
" embalmer " is included among those of a " royal, legitimate son." * The
idea of securing a sort of immortality to the departed was therefore com-
paratively new, and the theory of the " kha," or immaterial double of the
deceased, though met with in a Third Dynasty inscription,2 does not seem
to have acquired its full importance till later.3 It is very doubtful whether,
by the words which we render " spirit," primitive man meant anything at
all answering to the modern idea of ghosts. The anthropomorphism of
the political nations is scarcely primitive ; the " spirits of the land and the
grain " invoked in China, bear no resemblance to the spirits of the woods
and waters called into being by Greek imagination ; the one conception is
philosophic and rational, while the other belongs to the domain of poly-
theistic fancy. The founders of civilization meant, by the spirit of a thing,
exactly what a modern rationalist, whose vocabulary is not narrowed by
prejudice, would mean ; namely, the sum of its immaterial influences and
effects.

A list of gods derived from the Sixth Dynasty includes such abstractions
as Life, Joy, Truth, the Year, Eternity, Long Time, and the like ; 4 and it
is really easier to suppose that such things of the mind were believed in
and reverenced in their obvious spiritual or intellectual sense, rather than
as mere personifications of the objects of thought. A religion including
such deities was no doubt too difficult for the many, and accordingly
Truth, Eternity, and the Five Senses are nearly the only deities of this type

1 Denkmaler, ii. 19. 2 Journ. As., 8th Ser., xv. 307.

3 For versions of the funeral texts found in the pyramids of Unas, Teti, Pepi I. and II.,
and Sokarimsef, see Maspero, Rec. de Trav., i., iii. and x. The dominant ideas are
purification of the dead, as such, and the attainment of a sort of life beyond for the
double, by a mystical identification with the gods through the formulae said on his behalf,
and a mystical enrichment of this after life by the offerings made to the spirit or to the
gods in his name.

4 j&gyptische Geschichte, A. Wiedemann, pt. i. p. 53.

i54 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

who continue to appear frequently in the Egyptian pantheon. But the
wise and subtle men of letters who distinguished, among fit objects for
human reverence, the thought of the Present, the year that is passing, the
long Time through which men can look forward or behind them, and the
infinite Forever of speculation, — such men as these were certainly not
influenced in their pious commemoration of the dead, by the fear lest the
unpropitiated ancestor's ghost should " walk," with baleful designs against
the health or safety of the survivors. A race of affectionate fathers thought
of their dead selves as still wishing for tokens of loving ministration from
their bereaved families, and the customary rites embodied this feeling.

In China the reverence given to the spirit of a deceased ancestor is paid
to the memory which his descendants retain of him, and the posthumous
existence, thus secured to the spirit, is as nearly as possible the same as
what Comte calls the subjective existence, enjoyed by the departed in the
minds of survivors. This worship is the result and evidence of the reality
of filial piety among the Chinese ; the power of realizing the existence of
deceased ancestors has been deliberately cultivated as a religious duty; and
the emperors, the descendants of Confucius, and any one else with a well-
known line of ancestry, will recognise the obligation of embracing all these
kindred spirits in the same acts of commemorative devotion. But the
thirst for immortality, though not unknown in China, is regarded as a weak-
ness to be resisted rather than proclaimed. Accordingly, when the China-
man thinks of his future, his fancy dwells on the pleasant image of many
sons and grandsons gathered in the ancestral hall to perform the usual rites,
but he does not picture to himself his own presence, either as enjoying
the offerings or hovering hungrily round the human circle which he can-
not enter.

The Egyptians, on the other hand, were passionately fond of life, and
they had not cultivated that refinement of disinterestedness which makes
men content that the world should go on without them, if it goes on
well. Filial piety was perhaps as real as in China, and the dead were not
less dependent on it for due performance of the customary rites ; but the
living Egyptian cared more for his own future than for his children's, and
more therefore than he could expect them to care ; hence his eagerness to
provide an indestructible shell for the spirit, which he thought of as out-
living his body ; and an inviolable sanctuary for this, his spirit's resting-
place. The notion of a spiritual double, which might at will slumber in its
own mummy or wander disembodied in the fields of the West, after passing
through all the dangers of the Under World, was only arrived at by degrees.
The original idea was more confused, and yet in a way more simple.

All that human art could do was to preserve a sort of simulacrum of
the body, and, on the whole, it was natural and convenient to provide an
imitation body with imitation food and drink. The most devoted children
could hardly be expected to bring fresh meats to the tomb every day, but
the pictured offerings were always there ; and in the early days of art, while
there still seems something half miraculous in the power of representing

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 155

real thoughts and objects on a silent wall, such a substitution of the shadow
for the reality carried with it no suggestion of insincerity or disrespect. On
the contrary, the man who, perhaps five thousand years ago, superintended
the execution of the mural pictures which we still admire, was himself pro-
viding a very real and costly offering to his own manes ; and he had no
reason to suppose that this, which satisfied his own imagination while he
lived, would be otherwise than acceptable to as much of him as might sur-
vive the death and embalmment of his body.

There is thus very little doubt that, in the case of private persons, the
offerings of infinite number and variety represented in the mural pictures
were intended as a substitute for the things themselves, or a picture of the
same things as imagined to exist in the shadowy Under World. The children
inherited the real produce of the objective estates ; the spirit was indulged
with the subjective produce of the pictured fields and hunting grounds.
The "workmen of the eternal dwelling"1 sing as they plough visionary
fields for the spirit who loved glad service in his life ; and when, in later
dynasties, a change comes over the spirit of the monuments, the gods them-
selves are not expected to be more exacting than the dead. The future of
the soul came to be thought of as depending more upon the justice or
mercy of the divine powers in the Under World than on the piety of human
posterity ; but these powers were evidently expected to be propitiated by
the wall pictures, which show the deceased in the act of offering them wor-
ship, or as dedicating to them the produce of the imaginary fields.

The above view is confirmed by the absence of similar decorations from
the pyramids erected by kings who did, in fact, bestow lands and money,
during their life, for the endowment of their own posthumous worship. The
silence of the early inscriptions concerning gifts to the gods (apart from
funeral sacrifices), mention of which becomes a stock formula in and after
the Twelfth Dynasty, shows conclusively that the ancient kings of Egypt,
like those of China, did little to subsidise any worship save such as was
rendered at their own ancestral tombs. Not even a king, however, could
expect to have his worship kept up in remoter ages, when his memory had
paled before the fresher glories of his last descendants, unless some living
guardian or representative of his fame could be enlisted and given an
hereditary interest in the perpetuation of his rites. In other words, it was
vain to endow a tomb or temple without providing a body of hereditary
guardians or curators of the same, that is to say, an hereditary priesthood
charged to carry on the worship out of the revenues provided for the
trust. The provision made for the priest attached to such worship was
as it were, an accident, not involving any tribute to the sacred character
of the ministrant.

In China there is no natural connection between Buddhism and ancestor-
worship, rather the contrary ; yet a desire for the same result has suggested
the use of similar means, and, since only an endowed corporation can be ex-
pected to keep up the same practices from age to age, some families in the

1 Denkmaler, ii. 51.

156 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

neighbourhood of Peking have founded large Buddhist monasteries, the
monks of which hold their fee on condition of keeping the family burial-
places of their patrons in order. A more usual and more orthodox arrange-
ment is to place a family of slaves in charge of an ancestral burial-
place, giving them land enough in its immediate neighbourhood for their
own support and leaving them to provide for themselves, their work as
caretakers being of course only occasional and light. Egyptian donations
in land and slaves for maintaining the service of tombs or temples were no
doubt exactly of this character ; and until the worship of the gods attained
its later development, there was as little inducement in Egypt as in China
to provide for the endowment of a priesthood, except so far as the divine
character of the kings caused the guardians of their tombs to take priestly
rank from the first.

Even if we were wrong in supposing the endowment of tombs to have
preceded that of temples, it would nevertheless remain certain that,
throughout the long course of Egyptian history, the revenues of the priest-
hood were derived from two distinct sources ; and that there was not much
difference between the importance of the two, in their relations to the pro-
prietary institutions of the country. Over and above the share in the land
and other wealth of the country which they received as owners or trustees
of the temple estates on behalf of the gods, there was an equally certain
and perhaps not much less considerable revenue to be derived from the
piety of private persons, who entrusted to them the duty of performing the
sacrifices or making the offerings considered nee >.ssary for the well-being
of their departed relatives.

There are three important examples of private endowments, dating re-
spectively from the Twelfth, the Thirteenth, and the Eighteenth Dynasties,
the provisions of which throw a good deal of light incidentally upon the
position of the priests, their relation to the Government, and their rights as
landowners. The first of these foundations no doubt resembled the endow-
ments bestowed by earlier kings upon their own pyramids or a favourite
temple. Khnumhotep, whose tomb at Beni Hassan1 has been frequently
described, celebrated his accession to a governorship by the foundation of
a sort of ancestral temple, with an officiating priest, to whom he gave dona-
tions in " lands and peasants," and who was charged to provide funeral
offerings for all the feasts of the Under World. These are enumerated at
length, and include monthly and bi-monthly feasts ; feasts at the beginning
and end of the year, at the summer and winter solstice, at the five inter-
calary days of the year, and some others. The inscription recording the
foundation concludes with an imprecation against the priest or any other
person who may cause these observances to cease : " May he not exist, and
may his son not sit in his seat."2

1 In this inscription, after boasting how he has made his own name to flourish
eternally, Khnumhotep adds: "he made the names of those under him to flourish as
he represented them there in their offices '* — an expression which proves that such re-
presentations had the significance ascribed to them, ante, p. 82.

2 Brugsch, Hist, of Egypt (Eng. trans.), vol. i. p. 151.

TffE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 157

The story of Saneha, though not strictly historical, may be accepted as
evidence of what great personages in the Twelfth Dynasty were supposed
in the Nineteenth, when the narrative was classical, to have regarded as the
crowning honour of a fortunate career. After his return from Edom,
Saneha receives from the king the gift of a dwelling-place, and enjoys meals
sent to him three or even four times a day from the palace ; but the chief
favour conferred on him is the building for him a stone pyramid " among
the Funeral Pyramids," with designs carved and executed by the chief
artists of the king; and when this was completed, an enclosure with fields
and peasants to cultivate it was also assigned by way of endowment.
Khnumhotep, as a feudal magnate, was buried on his own ground among
his own people, but landless officers or favourites of the king might look
forward by his favour to the same kind of posthumous distinction.

We do not know at what date the funeral offerings and libations ceased to
be made by the children of the deceased, but some time between the Ancient
and the Middle Empire it seems to have become usual for the family to
employ professional assistance, and the change was very probably promoted
by the increase which took place, during the same period, in the number
of the hierarchy available for such services. The hieroglyph for priest
represents a figure making a libation, showing that the performance of this
ceremony was their chief and distinguishing function.

A very curious and instructive series of contracts, referring to the endow-
ment of his memorial statues, by the nomarch of Siout, in the Thirteenth
Dynasty, has been published by Dr. Erman.1 They are ten in number,
some similar in form, but varying in the amount of the goods assigned. They
describe the agreements entered into by the nomarch with three classes
of priests ; namely, those of the Necropolis, of Anubis, and those of Apu-at.
All are concerned with the honours to be rendered on certain feasts (partly
the same as those mentioned by Khnumhotep) to five statues of the de-
ceased, to be placed one at each temple, one at the grave, and one in the
garden of his house. Processions, illuminations, and sacrifices are to be
held at specified dates, and the priests undertake to praise and light up for
him "as for their own noble ones." The transaction is represented in the
form of barter, such and such loaves, etc., for the statue, in return for such
and such an assignment of his hereditary interest in such beasts or loaves.
The different sources of the property to be ceded are described in full.
The nomarch distinguishes what comes to him " from the house of his
father" and what from "the house of the prince," the latter term being
understood to refer to the lands and rents forming the revenue of the
nomarch's office. What small donation he proposes to make from the latter
source is conditional on the goodwill of his successors, and might be revoked
by them. He seems, however, not to expect this to occur ; and it is pos-
sible that public opinion in all classes was so much in favour of memorial
foundations, that kings and princes were generally willing to waive their

1 Zeitschrift fur **Egypt. Sprache und Altherthumskunde, 1882, p. 159 ff. jEg. u. &g.
Leben, p. 140.

158 O WNERSHIP IN EG YPT.

fractional rights over property alienated for such purposes. Both the here-
ditary and the official property include lands, people, cattle, gardens, and
" all things ; " the nomarch, for instance, is entitled to a thigh from every
beast slain for sacrifice in the Necropolis, and to a share in the offerings of
the temple.

Our particular nomarch ] is himself a priest, and as such, had an heredi-
tary interest in the temple revenues of bread, meat, and beer. The priest is
such by birth (if he pleases), while the nomarch is often, as in this case,
nominated to his office by the king; but the nomarch is ex offitio chief
prophet, or " great first one of the Lycopolites," and he has a share in the
sacrifices as such, apart from his hereditary interest in them. The ancestral
property assigned consisted partly of land, and partly of " days of the tem-
ple ;" that is, a fixed proportion of the fixed rations assigned daily, or
rather yearly, to the temple. He explains that one-tenth part of the whole
is a day ; and, as he was one of ten priests, a tenth of this fraction would
represent his share. In one of the contracts, he assigns this interest of his
in twenty-four " temple days." The exact value of the " temple day " is 100
loaves and one vessel of beer, which we may therefore take to represent the
rations of a priestly family. The donation, which is conditional on the
consent of his successors, is that of a certain share in the firstfruits of a
plot belonging to the nomarch, like that which every subject of Siout gives
from the firstfruits of his harvest, so that, in effect, he proposes to make
the princely land pay tribute to the temple.

The sixth deed is the most curious of all, for it is concluded between
the nomarch in his two capacities. He is himself high priest of Apu-at,
and representative, therefore, of the college to which he entrusts the care
of his grave and garden. He sells his hereditary priest's share in so many
"temple days" to the high priest (at the moment himself), and to the
priesthood generally, in return for their engaging to perform the desired
rites. It is supposed, from the style, that these contracts were concluded
by word of mouth, and only a sort of abstract of them written on the walls ;
and it may fairly be conjectured that the chief prophet took advantage of
his position in order to have them so written, and the permanence of the
foundation thus further secured, since, down to the age of Bocchoris, private
persons seem to have had no further witness or security for their dealings
than the good faith of the priestly bodies, or memoranda of transactions
voluntarily preserved by them.

The ordinary funeral sacrifices included the thigh of a bull, a gazelle, and
a bird ; and, in the latter days of the Egyptian monarchy, the provision for
these offerings, and the usual loaves and libations, came to furnish employ-
ment and emoluments to whole classes of the priesthood. We see what
kind of provision priests and nobles standing next in importance to the
king considered desirable for the honour and welfare of their own manes ;
and with the popularization of the later theology, and the multiplication of
something like a middle class, the collective demand for similar observ-
1 His name is given as Hpt'faa.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 159

ances, on the part of all but the poorest, reached extraordinary dimensions.
As, however, the documents bearing on this subject all belong to the period
of foreign domination, it will be more convenient to refer to them hereafter
in their chronological place, when the history of the temple endowments
under the native kings has been traced.

The third example of private endowment is interesting, because the pre-
cautions taken by the founder to secure its permanence show exactly to
what kind of risk such endowments were exposed. It is furnished by an
inscription of the time of Amenhotep III., by no less a person than the
king's secretary and namesake, the great artist and engineer who erected
the twin colossal portrait statues of the king, of which one bears the name
of Memnon. This Amenhotep, surnamed the Wise, wished to found a
family temple of his own to the god Amon ; this temple he intends to "re-
main secure to his sons and daughters for all time, from son to son, from
heir to heir," not, of course, for any secular use to themselves, but, in effect,
as an ancestral temple, under the protection of " Amon Ra, the king of the
gods, king in eternity, he who protects the dead."

The gift includes land and slaves for the service of the temple, who, with
their descendants, are attached to its estate ; and the dedicatory inscription
goes on to stipulate, with a curious mixture of legal acuteness and religious
solemnity, that if at any future time the temple is suffered to decay, or the
slaves belonging to it are removed, then " the chiefs and secretaries of the
assessment of taxes " shall intervene, and the whole place and adminis-
tration shall be given up to Pharaoh —and the founder's soul will therewith
rest content.

But the most awful imprecations are declared against the officers of the
assessment if they fail to execute this charge, and against the high priests,
the holy fathers, and the priests of Amon, if they make its execution neces-
sary, by failing to protect this temple of Kak, or converting it to other uses
than those contemplated by its founder.

The temple, thus carefully defended by curses on the one hand, and
blessings upon all friends and protectors on the other, survived long enough
to be restored under the Ptolemies, when Amenhotep, turned into a god of
wisdom, was added to the tutelary deities of the spot. It was subsequently
christianized in the name of S. Phebamon, and the shrine continued to be
much revered down to the tenth century A.D. ; and, what is still more
curious, parents used to give their children as slaves to its service, to culti-
vate the lands belonging to it, and maintain its sacred lamp.1 It may even
be that, in some undiscovered Moslem garb, the spirit of the old Egyptian
still enjoys some approach to the subjective existence which he was at so
much pains to secure.

The appeal in this inscription to the officers of the assessment is of great

value incidentally, as a tribute to the moderation of the revenue collectors,

who were thought less likely than the priests to interfere wrongfully with

the execution of the testator's purpose ; while it also proves that the real

1 Cours de droit Egyptien, p. 99. &g. Zeitschrift, 1875, p. 133.

160 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

difference between sacred (and, no doubt, also military) lands and those of
the common people was that the latter alone were liable for land tax.

These foundations were probably in no way exceptional, and the arrange-
ments to which they introduce us may be taken as representative. A stele
of the Twelfth Dynasty, in the Gizeh Museum, commemorates an here-
ditary prince Amenemhat, who was also a high priest, and had discharged
the functions of a prophet ; he speaks of having entered into arrangements
with the prophets of Abydos, which the context, and the precedent of the
nomarch of Siout, lead us to imagine must have referred to the maintenance
of the stele. From the beginning to the end of Egyptian history, there
seems to have survived the same inarticulate sense of the value of subjec-
tive existence, of the reality of possessions and enjoyments which were
thought of by somebody in connection with the departed.

The Egyptian idea went beyond the ordinary primitive confusion of time
and space, which supposes the spirits in another world to be able to taste
the offerings presented to them in this. The things given to the kha or
double of the man, according to the later monuments, are such as mortals
themselves desire, — food and drink, the gathering of flowers, the tasting
the sweet breath of the north wind, and to behold the sun and moon; and
down to the Twelfth Dynasty, the gods are entreated to bestow all these
things upon the deceased himself. But it is quite apart from any idea of
human prayers, as likely to be granted by the gods, that friendly passers-
by are appealed to, to wish these things for the dead. Life is called
"the echo of the mouth," and the departed are supposed to live by the
echo of the survivor's words. " You who rejoice in life, and as yet know
not death," are often appealed to, as well as priests or prophets, who
wish their dignity to descend to their sons, to remember the inmate of
a tomb by name, and say a prayer for him to the gods, whereby their
own name shall live long in the land. The stock inscription in funeral
chapels warns all whom it may concern that : " If any one remove my
name to make room for his own, God will reject him by destroying his
image upon earth ; but if he respects my name (i.e. the name upon the
stele), God will do to him as he has done to me." The mere preserva-
tion of the image or the name was an advantage in itself.

There is a memorial inkstand in existence, with an inscription adjuring
every one who uses it to say : " Oblation of a thousand loaves and drinks
to the person of the noble chief, grand minister of the interior of the lord
of the two countries, Psar, the beloved of Thoth ;" and in re-committing
these words to the press, from the Egyptian point of view, a service is being
rendered to the spirit of Psar, wherein the favour shown him by the god of
wisdom is still clearly manifest ; for how, except by the grace of Thoth
could the hieroglyphs of Egypt have been deciphered ?

Even Christian converts kept to the aspirations of their ancestors. In a
Coptic MS. of the twelfth century, giving an account of an Egyptian
martyr under Diocletian, of professedly contemporary authorship, i.e. of the
4th cent. A.D., the holy father Isaac ends his last prayer with the truly

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 161

Egyptian petition: "that Thou wilt make the heart of him that shall volun-
tarily call his son by my name happy with joy ; and that Thou wilt give part
of the endless offering to him that shall make an offering at my tomb."1

The reason that there was so little progressive accumulation of wealth
in Egypt seems to have been that each generation spent its own savings on
its own tombs and temples ; and this habit of dedicating surplus income to
a comparatively disinterested, immaterial purpose helped to keep the greed
for accumulation at the temperate point required for national security. If
the rich and powerful had not devoted themselves to the preparation of an
" eternal habitation " for their own remains, the brief lodging-houses of the
living would have received more attention, and we should visit the ruins of
ancient palaces instead of tombs and temples. But it may be doubted
whether the palaces would have reached us in the same state of preserva-
tion as the temples.

A full proportion of the proverbial wisdom of the Egyptians lurks in the
counsel, " Do not build thy tomb on thine own estate," 3 where parsimonious
relatives will be tempted to appropriate it at the risk of sacrilege ; and the
neighbourhood of a temple was considered dangerous for similar reasons.
But the custom of dedication was too strong and wide-spread for any class
to enrich itself by appropriating the gilts of others. A large proportion of
the king's wealth was dedicated to the gods, and to the maintenance of
their priests ; the wealth of the priests was ostentatiously dedicated to the
maintenance of the sacred animals ; and, in fact, the only wealthy portion
of the community that failed to lay out its wealth, so as to conciliate some
other important interest, was that irresponsible portion which slumbered in
its mummy cloths.

The violation and robbeiy of tombs seems accordingly to have been the
most frequent and serious offence dealt with in the criminal courts. An
important State trial in the reign of Rameses IX., of the Twentieth
Dynasty, shows that a regular gang of thieves, with accomplices in the
sacerdotal body itself, had been formed for the purpose of robbing the
royal tombs. False informations were sometimes laid from malicious
motives, and as the accused were examined under the bastinado, even a
false accusation had its terrors. Besides carrying off the loose gold, silver
and other valuables deposited in the coffin, the gold used in inscriptions
or decorations outside the coffin, or on the funeral stele, was scraped off
with a knife, though the names of the gods were usually respected from
religious motives. The traces of fire often observed in ancient tombs are
supposed to indicate that the coffin was burnt in situ, after being stripped
of its valuables. A still surer sign of the frequency of the offence is fur-
nished by the Ritual of the Dead, for among the forty-two sins, of which the
dead are required to protest innocence, is that of stealing the property of
the gods, or the sacrificial food, or tearing from the dead their linen wraps.

1 Transactions S.B.A., ix. 38. If not contemporary, the survival is only the more
noteworthy.

2 E. Revillout, Cours de droit Egyptien, i. 29.

P.C. M

1 62 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

Even in the present century, though the temptation to such sacrilege has
become rare, Lane observed that when a corpse was wrapped in a Kash-
mir shawl, it was always rent, lest its value should attract thieves.

It is now generally understood that the ancient Egyptians were not a
melancholy race, always pre-occupied with sombre theological conceptions,
and over-shadowed by the thought of the ever-nearing tomb. On the
contrary, they were a light-hearted, easy-going, affectionate people, taking
life and death gaily, and enlivening both with simple festivities. Flowers
played as large a part in their daily life as in that of the South Sea
Islanders, whose clothing often consists of little else, and the trait is a
significant one. Only those nations crown themselves with flowers for
pleasure who have tastes of civilized delicacy, and who, at the same time,
are guided by a general, more or less conscious resolve to give themselves
all the pleasures they can by the indulgence of such tastes.1 Familiarity
with the idea of death and burial had made these incidents to some extent
a matter of indifference, perhaps even of pleasurable interest. Instead of
failing to enjoy their present life because of its anticipated end, they rather
enriched it with a double consciousness of the life they had and the life
which they imagined — and furnished with all desirable good things— for
their future disembodied self.

During his own life at least, if not afterwards, the builder of a handsome
tomb derived pleasure from its erection, just as the Chinaman, who has
been presented with a very fine coffin, enjoys while alive the certainty of
being handsomely buried when he is dead. When associations of this
class have been systematically cultivated for millenniums, phrases about the
uncertainty of life may be used with as much cheerfulness as any other
commonplace. The expression " if we live " occurs constantly in the most
ordinary business letters (like the " D.V." of a certain school of theology),
and so does the phrase, " But who can answer for the morrow ? " which
frequently concludes a good report of stock or crops from a farm bailiff to
his master. This constant sense of the uncertainty or brevity of human
life or fortune does not necessarily lead to a grave and earnest appreciation
of the present moment. It lends itself just as readily to the Epicurean
inference, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," or as the Egyp-
tian phrased it : " Feast in tranquillity, seeing that there is no one who
carries away his goods with him." 2

§ 3. PROPRIETARY INTERESTS OF THE PRIESTS AS UNDERTAKERS.

The most curious form of ownership developed in Egypt is associated
with this fatal and universal impossibility, though it originated with the
essentially domestic character of Egyptian ritual, which may also have

1 The flowers found in tombs, and presumably used for wreaths by the living, are for
the most part cultivated, not indigenous; they come from Syria, Asia Minor, Persia,
Mesopotamia, and even from Greece, India, and Ceylon — a witness at once to the Egyp-
tian love of flowers, and to the wide range of the commerce bv which they profited
indirectly. Kahun, Gurob and Hawara, W. Flinders Petrie, p. 48.

2 Records, iv. 115.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 163

contributed to keep the influence of the priesthood within bounds during
the whole period of national greatness. China has dispensed altogether
with a national priesthood, because the only rites recognised by the
national religion are those pertaining to the Worship of Ancestors and the
Worship of Heaven and Earth ; the latter of which is conducted by the
Emperor, and the former by the head of the family within his own house-
hold. The funeral rites which played so large a part in the religious
worship of Egypt were originally addressed more to the ancestors than to
the gods, and their performance therefore would not necessarily have in-
volved the intervention of priests, were it not for the technical skill and
knowledge required in embalming. But the endowment of tombs suggested
the endowment of temples, and both involved the endowment of priests ;
and later on the existence of this class, which possessed at the same time
landed property available for cemeteries, and a monopoly of the art of
mummification, resulted in the whole business of burying their fellow-
citizens being handed over to them.

This was brought about in two ways. As in China, a custom, based no
doubt on sanitary grounds, prohibited the interment of the dead within
the populated towns or villages ; cultivated fields were at the same time
too valuable to be given up to unproductive uses, and also unfitted for the
great object of preserving the body from decay. Kings and nobles could
afford to carve themselves sepulchres in the rocky sides of the hills border-
ing the valley of the Nile, but for ordinary mortals the choice of a burial-
ground presented serious difficulties. We have seen that Saneha depended
on the liberality of the king for the site of his funeral pyramid ; and when
all land was either occupied or royal property, the difficulty would evidently
require to be met by some expedient of general applicability, and suscep-
tible of indefinite extension. In the Fifth Dynasty, when every one of
consequence aspired to be buried in the City of Pyramids (Memphis), the
available space became, in the course of centuries, so scanty that the tombs
of former generations were encroached upon, or stolen out of hand. To-
wards the close of the dynasty, a magistrate of Nechent boasts — as of a
rare distinction — that his grave lies on a pure spot, where no man's grave
has ever been before, and that he has taken for it nothing that has ever
belonged to another.1

In the Ancient Empire possibly none but members of the governing
class aspired to the possession of an eternal dwelling-place ; but a con-
siderable proportion of the monuments at Beni Hassan, dating from the
Twelfth Dynasty, belong to persons of private station, though considerable
wealth. Persons of this class, who had no claim upon the king, naturally
resorted to the priests ; the temples necessarily stood on ground raised
above the inundation ; land which had no other value was available both
for tombs and temples, and it is possible that both purposes were con-
sidered in the gifts made to the hierarchy. Any way, it is certain that in
time the provision for a portion of the priesthood came to consist in their
1 Meyer, 'Geschichte, p. 130.

1 64 • OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

ownership of ground used for interments, while it also became usual for
the owner of the grave to be entrusted with and paid for the duty of
making the funeral libations and offerings.

The organization of the Necropolis, or funeral quarter of Thebes, under
the later empire is comparatively well understood — at least, so far as its
administration and its relations to the Government are concerned. Under
the Lagidae we have copious documents illustrating the agreements entered
into between private persons and the lowest orders of the priesthood, who
played the part, as it were, of sextons and undertakers in Egypt. But M.
Revillout, who has made this subject his own,1 is of opinion that these
deeds are all posterior to the destruction of Thebes, after its revolt, by
Ptolemy Soter, and that they represent a usurpation of the ancient rights
of the dispossessed priests of Amon on the part of the inferior branches
of the priesthood, who were too obscure to attract attention or hostilities.
Such an hypothesis has much to recommend it ; it is at variance with no
ascertained facts, and it obviates the necessity of assuming — what can
rarely be assumed safely in Egypt — the existence of an abrupt break or
change in the national customs.

All the great cemeteries of ancient Egypt resemble each other in situ-
ation, as the choice of all was determined by the same two considerations :
a sufficient distance from the town to enable the processes of embalmment
to be carried on in safety, and a sufficient height above the inundation to
prevent the tombs from being flooded. The Necropolis of Memphis and
those of Assiout and Abydos were situated at the foot of the Libyan chain.
Those of Beni Hassan, Tell el Amarna, and the one above El Kab were
similarly placed by the Arabian chain.2 The sanctity of the spot and the
fame of its temple determined the number of those seeking the privilege
of sepulture in each locality. Abydos was the first great place of resort
for all the rest of Egypt, and the city of the dead there bears a larger pro-
portion to the size of the inhabited town than in any other case. With the
growing celebrity of the temple and priesthood of Amon at Thebes, the
funeral quarter of that city began to attain the remarkable extension to
which various documents of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties bear
witness.

The Necropolis generally had a wall of its own; the workmen employed
upon the numerous industries carried on within it received daily or weekly
rations, and took their orders from the priests, as the same class elsewhere
did from private proprietors. The priests and servants of the temple were
under the orders of the high priest of Amon at Thebes, the high priest of
Ptah at Memphis, and of Osiris at Abydos. Nearly all the magistrates of
the inhabited town seem to have had their counterparts or duplicates in
the quarter of the west ; there was a separate police for the Necropolis,
and it seems doubtful whether these officers were subject to the authority

1 Zeitschrift fur ^Eg. Spr. u. Altherthumskunde, 1879 '•> Unefamille de parachistes on
taricheutes Thebains, ib., 1880; Taricheutes et choachytes, 3 Nos. Revue Egyptologique,

1887 ; Les Papiers administrative* dtt Serapeum.
2 Rev. £gyptolot>ique, 1887, iv. 152.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 165

of the nomarch or claimed to receive their orders from Pharaoh himself
alone. In the strike referred to above, the workpeople appealed to the
king, and an officer of the city was sent to report upon the riots, which the
authorities of the Necropolis had failed to pacify.

The so-called Abbott papyrus describes a judicial inquiry, held during
the reign of Rameses IX., into an alleged robbery of the royal tombs ;
and it appears from this that the relations between the secular ruler and
his independent neighbours were not always of the most harmonious
description. The proceedings began by two scribes of the Necropolis
reporting to the nomarch that certain royal tombs within it had been
plundered. The first commission appointed to inquire into the truth of
these allegations was composed of the nomarch, an officer of the king,
and the scribe of Pharaoh, who are called collectively the great magis-
trates. The result of their inquiry was to show that only one of the royal
tombs had been entered ; the others were all in good order : then a fresh
charge was brought respecting the graves of the relatives of the king ; but
the witness in this case could only lead the commission to an empty, dis-
used grave, and said he had never visited any other, so that again all the
accused were acquitted and their accusers condemned for bearing false
witness.

This result, though eminently satisfactory to the authorities of the
Necropolis, was not convincing to the nomarch, and even at this distance
of time there is something a little suspicious about the change of front
of the witnesses, quite compatible with the theory that it had been made
worth their while to tell a different story. Lively recriminations were
exchanged by the governor of the Necropolis and the nomarch, and there
can be little doubt, that the interests of justice were subordinated by one
or both to the promptings of personal or official jealousy. Either the
nomarch got up an unfounded and vexatious charge, in order to discredit
the authorities of the Necropolis, or the latter, having been guilty of real
negligence, tried to screen themselves by subornation of perjury.1 This
incident of course belongs to the comparatively late period when the
hierarchy had already begun to rival the wealth and influence of the
Crown.

The embalmment of the dead, the preparation of coffins and of all the
drugs, spices, and bandages used for the mummies, the performance of
the ceremonies connected with interments, and the provision of the com-
memorative offerings and libations for the dead, provided occupation for a
number of priests of different ranks, as well as for whole classes of artisans.
Every step in the preparation of the corpse had its appropriate formula
suggestive of a spiritual meaning, and as it was of the utmost importance
to the 'deceased that these formulae should be duly pronounced, the whole
process of embalmment continued in the hands of the priests, and was
regarded as a religious ceremony, in spite of its painful and materialistic
side. The Necropolis must have included common sepulchres for receiv-
1 Maspero, Une Enqudte judidaire & Thebes, 1872.

i66 OWNERSHIP JN EGYPT.

ing the mummies of the poor, which may have been maintained at the
expense of the State, the city, or perhaps the general revenues of the temple ;
but rich private persons under the Middle and Later Empire, as under the
Greeks, no doubt secured a plot for themselves by purchase. Tombs
might be appropriated without complaint, after they had fallen into neglect
by the dying out or removal of a family, which would put an end to the
payments made on its behalf, and sometimes desirable burial-places not so
deserted were taken by force.

The payments made to the priests of the Necropolis were on two, or
perhaps rather three, separate accounts. There was the price paid for the
burial-place itself,1 which might be bought in perpetuity or for a term of
years, and a payment which, in the absence of a permanent endowment,
would have to be renewed annually by the surviving members of the
family, on account of the " liturgies " or funeral services, which had to be
rendered at certain specified times, especially at the great festival of Amon.
Besides these charges, which brought in a regular revenue from every
family on account of its dead, there were also the "fruits," objects brought
occasionally in honour of the deceased, and therefore an uncertain element,
except so far as the receipts from different individuals were likely to
average themselves from year to year. The same distinction existed in
the case of the temple revenues, and helps to show the general parallelism
between private and public religious rites.

Under the Greeks, three classes of persons are named as taking part in
the funeral services : the paraschistes, the taricheutes, and the choachytes.
M. Revillout, in the series of papers above referred to, has shown good
reason for the opinion that the two first names, which are used indis-
criminately to translate a single demotic term, denote the same class of
operators, those namely by whom the actual work of embalmment was
carried on. The choachytes on the contrary, or the professional pourers
of libations on behalf of the son, had no direct contact with the corpse,
and claimed a place, though a humble one, in the general service of the
temple ; at Thebes, they bore the title of pastophores of Amon-Api, and
took part in certain processions. The outgoings of the choachytes were
for funeral utensils, some of which were costly, and for the wine actually
or nominally used in the libations ; and in some cases they provided halls
for the funeral rites as well as the actual burying-places. The details of
the funeral arrangements were different in Thebes and Memphis, and the
status of the different parties engaged in them varied also. Latterly at
Thebes, the paraschistes appear as owners of the cemeteries, while the
choachytes act as sole representatives of the priesthood in the funeral ser-
vices. At Memphis, where the temple establishment had been less mal-
treated, a high priest presided over the funeral rites, while the commercial

1 The sale of the burial-plot carried with it the right of performing the customary cere-
monies at the tombs — a right which might be owned by women who did not perform
the ceremonies in person. (Deveria, Catalogue, p. 211.) A demotic papyrus (690 fe.C.)
seems to show that the arrangements were the same as in later times.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 167

side of the transaction was left to the choachytes, whose dignity was
sustained by their wealth.

During the Ancient and Middle Empire the title of Cher-heb (which is
subsequently rendered paraschiste) is borne by a number of exalted per-
sonages, and seems to indicate generally a ministrant, or performer of
funeral ceremonies. Originally it is probable that only the bodies of the
rich and great were embalmed ; the practice could certainly not have
become general till the establishment of regular commercial intercourse
with the spice-producing countries; and while it was exceptional, the
ritual belonging to it may have remained among the mysteries of the
higher priesthood. M. Revillout says the ancient cher-heb was more than
an embalmer, but supposing him always to have had that function among
others, it is one which might have been considered appropriate to a great
man, while embalming was still a new rare mystery, or magic (the king's
cher-heb was generally a magician), and to a low official when everybody
was mummified, more or less. The name itself is variously rendered as
the " roll-bearer," the " man of the book," the " man of rites or cere-
monies," and the "reading priest," or he who recites "what is usual before
the king when he goes forth." 1

At all times the funeral services seem to have required three performers,
as it were a priest, a deacon or acolyte, and an inferior attendant. Ordinary
usage seems to have given the title of cher-heb to the chief performer in
the funeral rites, and in the course of ages its application seems to have
passed from the highest to the lowest rank ; but these lowest ranks again
increased in importance after the extinction of the learned priesthood,
when nothing was left of the native religious worship except the observance
of funeral ceremonies.

The proprietary institutions of choachytes and taricheutes are more
curious than important, except so far as they represent the general com-
mercial usages of the country or surviving traces of priestly tradition. One
of the earliest papyri translated by Young, recorded the sale of "half
one-third of the collections for the dead priests of Osiris . . . likewise
half one-third of the liturgies." 2 A cession of property under the fifth
Ptolemy enumerates in the same category with houses, lands, buildings,
gardens, furniture, cattle, silver, gold, brass, and household utensils, the
following less material articles of property— contracts, liturgies, tombs, and
deeds ; while the conclusion of the whole matter is summarized, as a
cession of everything in general, and liturgies and a funeral hall in
particular.

Deeds of this kind are very numerous, and the calm way in which the
parties to them buy and sell their deceased neighbours, and in some cases
the living, as well as the dead, has often been the subject of remark. The
arrangements made, however, are not as peculiar as the language in which
they are described. What is called the sale of the dead means only

1 Ennan, p. 102.

2 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, p. 314.

168 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

that a contract to perform such ceremonies on their behalf is transferred
from one person to another for a price.

In commercial Babylonia, contracts as well as bonds were commonly
dealt with as exchangeable property, and the spirit of Egyptian usage was
the same, though the principle had not received such an extensive applica-
tion there.1 It shows, of course, the uniformity of business arrangements
in these countries, that it could be treated as a matter of indifference to the
customer, whether the services, for which he had paid, should be rendered
to him by the person with whom he had contracted or by some third party,
the creditor or assignee of the latter. The uncertainty of quality, which our
modern system of competitive trading casts upon all workmanship and
commodities, would render such arrangements impossible now.

As a further illustration of conservatism in commerce, it is notable that
bargains binding future generations are entered upon without hesitation.
A man appoints his own choachyte or undertaker, but he also stipulates
that his children and remoter descendants shall be buried by the choachyte's
children and descendants ; and the right to bury a family is transferable,
exactly because the family can be depended on not to bestow its patronage
on any fresh firm or company.

Different members of the profession entered freely into arrangements
for their mutual convenience, by which they divided with one another the
families which they were jointly entitled to inter, particular districts being
assigned to the different parties to the contract. The breach of such an
arrangement led to actions in which we find one taricheute accusing
another of wrongfully burying the corpses which belong to him, just as a
medical man who has bought a " practice " may take proceedings against
a vendor, who continues to prescribe within the district he has agreed to
vacate. In the sales of such rights to inter, it is always specified that the
fee and the corpse wrongfully received shall be given up, and a penalty
paid in addition ; 2 and it is possible that the secure value ascribed to the
position of family undertaker was partly due to a system of cash payments.

The mode in which the interment was effected depended upon the
outlay, and as the taricheutes had to buy from the merchants the costly
essences and spices used, they probably regulated their expenditure by the
sum delivered to them at the same time as the corpse. It was open to the
natural guardian of the corpse to provide these ingredients himself, as
appears from a deed in which a bereaved father contracts with a wholesale
merchant for their delivery to the taricheute who is acting for him. And

1 We are apt to consider the trading systems of the Old World narrow-minded and
unimaginative compared with those of the present century ; but it appears that a degree
of conservative fixity in commercial affairs may actually have the result of extending the
flexibility and range of commercial transactions. An Egyptian or Babylonian, wishing
to realize the whole of his property at any given moment, could treat the orders on his
books as an asset of calculable value ; because it was a matter of indifference to the
customer, by whom he was served, when all tradesmen gave similar goods for the same
customary price.

2 Cours de droit Egyptian, p. 119. The right to bury the slaves (and even the abortive
births) of a family is reserved by contract.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 169

though such an arrangement was perhaps exceptional, we may infer from
it that the emoluments of the taricheutes were not supposed to consist in a
profit charged on the drugs used in their art. In fact, the services rendered
by this class were evidently of a material kind only. It is not as priests,
but as the holders of available plots of ground, that members of the
hierarchy sell or let desirable burial-places. This is so much the case,
that a layman, having bought a tomb, already partially occupied, some time
before he expected to take possession of it himself, had acquired from the
vendor a specified share in the funeral offerings brought on behalf of his
tenant. He had paid down the full value of the tomb, and by way of
interest on the purchase-money he was to receive a share of the revenues
it brought in.

During the period to which these documents belong, the choachytes
formed a corporation or guild, with elaborate provisions for the protection
and guidance of members of the profession. They were governed by a
president and two assessors, all elected and frequently changed. These
officers applied the laws decided upon by the general assembly, and were
authorized to conduct lawsuits in the name of the corporation. They
looked after the interests of the public as well as their own, for the least
infraction of their professional duties was visited with fines, while a sort of
excommunication was pronounced in the case of serious derelictions. It
was especially provided that the wine of the sacrifices, which seems to have
been regarded as a particularly valuable perquisite, should be consumed
upon the premises, not taken away and applied to secular uses.

These regulations, though apparently of recent origin so far as the
choachytes are concerned, were not likely to have been invented afresh by
them. It was an innovation for the whole charge of the rites, connected
with interments, to be left in the hands of the inferior priests, by whom the
more material services were rendered; but as this change was only brought
about by the impoverishment or suppression of the higher orders, it is
certainly likely that the regulations in customary use were retained.

§ 4. TEMPLE PROPERTY.

It is impossible to say how early lands were assigned for the mainten-
ance of the priests attached to particular temples of the gods, though a
beginning must have been made as early as the Fourth Dynasty, when
Ptah-ases— the adopted son of Menkara (Mycerinus) and son-in-law of
his successor — who was chief of the priesthood of the god Ptah at Mem-
phis, also acted as "governor of the domains of the temple of Sokaris."
The earliest gifts from kings to temples must, however, certainly have been
bestowed before the priesthood had come to form a large and separate class
of the population. Such donations were not unknown, though not common
under the ancient monarchy ; but the form of endowment contemplated by
latter-day legend and the caste theory belongs almost certainly to the latest,
not the earliest phase of religious development. We may infer from the title

170 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

of "chief priest," given to some of the notables whose tombs have been
described, the existence of a body of inferior hierophants ; but these might
have been originally maintained, as in other times and places, out of the
temple offerings without the existence of any special temple domains.
The temples of the kings were, however, intended as a tribute to the divine
character of Pharaoh, and it was natural that, as the national religion de-
veloped, devout kings should desire to show the same liberality to the gods
as to their ancestors.

Both priests and people were more secularly minded under the ancient
monarchy than later. The names of the gods do not always, as subse-
quently, enter into the composition of the king's name, and, as in Greece
and Rome, members of the priesthood did not necessarily devote them-
selves exclusively, or even mainly, to their sacerdotal functions. Prin-
cesses bore the title of priestess or prophetess of Neit or Hathor, and the
king himself had no ecclesiastical superior. Representations of the gods,
and allegorical scenes illustrating the life after death, are comparatively
rare in the earliest monuments, which show us the deceased receiving
adoration, prayers, and libations from his family, and taking part in all the
ordinary occupations and amusements of life. With the Twelfth Dynasty
posthumous existence ceases to be the prerogative of kings and nobles ;
private persons claim it as it cheapens. In tombs of the Eighteenth
Dynasty the deceased appears as adoring sepulchral deities, though the
family ancestral worship still continues. In the Nineteenth Dynasty and
later, the title of " Osiris " is habitually bestowed upon the dead, and
theological conceptions of the life after death became all the more
popular, as the future bliss of the soul came to be associated with pious
knowledge, or a copy of the Ritual, rather than with the multitude of
sacrificial victims, real or pictured.

Three stages at least of religious feeling can be clearly distinguished.
Under the Ancient Empire, kings and nobles are themselves priests, and
probably for the most part themselves defrayed the expenses of the temples.
Under the Middle Empire, the kings give largely, and of their own accord,
to the service of the gods ; and with the Nineteenth Dynasty the gifts in-
crease, the whole country is put under contribution, and the liberality of
the kings is no longer quite disinterested \ the idea of merit comes in, and
the gods are supposed to reward their benefactor, by giving him victory
and success in this world, and in the next protection against all the mystic
assailants of the dead. Deceased ancestors and even kings are no longer
objects of reverence in their merely human capacity, but in virtue of some
spiritual identification with the divinity, to which the truly veracious soul
is allowed to look forward.

Originally the king seems to have given an estate outright to a particular
temple as he would give it to a great officer, the priests of the temple living
and providing the requisite sacrifices out of the produce. But supposing
it were desired to bestow some further benefaction upon a famous temple,
which had been already amply endowed with lands, a munificent king would

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 171

give towns and villages, with their inhabitants, to the god ; and in such
cases, obviously, what we must suppose to have been given is, what the
king possessed in relation to them, namely, the right to levy the land tax.
At a still later period, when the king wished to do something for the gods,
and had neither private estates nor surplus revenue which he could assign
to their service, he could and did issue edicts, calling on his subjects to
pay such and such a proportion of their produce to the temples, over and
above the ordinary land tax. These three kinds of endowment subsisted
together, and we can trace roughly the position of the priesthood involved
in the preponderance of one or other of them.

There were three chief priesthoods in Egypt — that of Heliopolis, Mem-
phis, and Thebes. The table of precedence translated by M. Maspero,
gives the first place to Thebes, and the second to Heliopolis, and was
therefore probably composed originally under one of the great Theban
Dynasties between the Twelfth and the Nineteenth. The greatness of
Heliopolis dates from prehistoric times, and little or nothing is known of
the priesthood presided over by " the great one who always beholds Ra
and Atoumou." Perhaps the kings of Lower Egypt bore this title them-
selves before the union of the two crowns; but the absence of definite
information as to the endowments of the sanctuary warrants the inference
that they must have been comparatively unimportant. The office of the
chief priest of Ptah at Memphis was not hereditary, but it was so richly
endowed that kings of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties sometimes
gave the office to their sons.1 These endowments date from the earliest
Memphite dynasties ; and as the city retained its importance even when no
longer the seat of government, they continued to be added to by successive
generations.

An officer like Ptah-ases no doubt administered the domains of the
temple under his governorship as he would administer the royal estates
entrusted to him, providing for the sacrifices of the temple as for the
sustenance of the palace, and maintaining the servants and the priestly
guardians of the temple out of its revenues, and accounting for the surplus,
which might be spent on monuments or religious festivals. With the
multiplication of temples and temple services, the number of officiating
priests must have increased, till it became more convenient to leave the
guardianship of the temple estates in their hands, with discretion to employ
the revenues for their own support and the worship of the god. The for-
mation of an hereditary priesthood was thus the direct consequence of
the endowments, especially the endowments of land, bestowed upon the
temples. The endowments of the Theban priesthood, the most modern of
the three, were probably as ancient as the city itself, and the office of high
priest was hereditary in the family which ultimately usurped the throne.
And it is certainly significant that the priesthood of latest origin was alone
hereditary.

From the Twelfth Dynasty onward, the kings themselves are careful to
1 Maspero, Manuel, p. 333.

172 O WNERSH1P IN EG YPT.

keep us informed as to the extent of their benefactions to the gods, and
their lists of treasure dedicated are like an echo of the still longer lists,
recording the tribute and warlike spoil which reward a successful campaign.
Just before the close of the obscure period which includes the Eleventh
Dynasty, an expedition was undertaken to the land of Punt, from whence,
among other valuables, " precious stones for the statues of the temples "
were brought back. Usurtasen I. was a great builder of temples, and his
son added to one of them i( the holy dwelling for the first seer of Amon,"
a building of which we hear incidentally in an inscription describing its
restoration by the ninth Rameses. Up to this date, therefore, it was not
a matter of course for the chief priest to have his dwelling within the pre-
cincts of the temple. With the transfer of the capital to Thebes, the
worship of the city god, Amon, began to increase in importance, till his
place as a national god was established under the early kings of the
Eighteenth Dynasty. This exaltation of Amon of Thebes was, however,
regarded as an innovation ; and the religious reaction under Amenophis IV.,
or Khuenaten, seerns to have been directed against it, as well as in favour
of the foreign religion introduced by the queen mother.

The religious observances and beliefs of Upper and Lower Egypt differed
as much as their political organization. Opposite versions of the myth of
Horus and Set were current in the sacerdotal colleges of Memphis and
Abydos. In Heliopolis, Memphis, and Lower Egypt generally, Horus and
Set were conceived as twins, symbolizing respectively the beneficence and
the power of the sun. In the religion of Abydos they were rivals, repre-
senting the irreconcilable principles of good and evil. The union of the
two districts under the ancient monarchy necessitated a compromise, re-
presented by the myth of the reconciliation of Horus and Set by Thoth,
that is, perhaps, the mediation of the priests of Hermopolis, or Un, half-
way between Memphis and Abydos, the centre of the worship of Thoth.
In the early days of Egypt, the rival versions of the legend could continue
to be handed down, each in its own locality, without giving rise to theo-
logical disputes ; but it became necessary to harmonise them when both
priests and laity began to take their mythology more seriously. The fact
that the doctrine of Abydos prevailed in the funeral rites of all Egypt
seems to show that the national worship was fixed during the period of
Theban supremacy, though the political importance of Lower Egypt secured
a considerable development to the worship of Set between the Eighteenth
and Twenty-first Dynasties.1

The great kings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties went be-
yond their predecessors in the magnificence of the temples they erected,
the value of the treasures they dedicated, and the extent of the land which
they devoted to sacred uses. After a successful campaign in Syria,
Thothmes III. assigned three cities to pay their taxes to the temple of
Amon at Thebes ; he employed his prisoners of war in enlarging it, and
foreigners of rank were counted among the rare and valuable gifts be-

1 Pierret on Schiaparelli's Livre des Fimerailles. Rev. Egyptologique, 1887, iv. 152.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 173

stowed from time to time on that and other shrines. Gardens, to grow
flowers and vegetables, were assigned to the temple,1 and this gift is in
itself significant of a growing density of population, and the changes which
thenceforward begin to appear in the form of endowments. Lands in
various parts of Upper and Lower Egypt had been at different times be-
stowed upon this temple, and these are enumerated by the care of Thothmes,
(1,800 acres in all), as are the temples to the same god in other parts of
the country, and the tributes in kind to which they are entitled. The
temples are thus larger and more magnificent than ever — too large to be
supported from the produce of any adjoining lands which could be granted
for their use, while that originally bestowed on them was no more than
enough for the gardens of the resident hierophants.

It is unfortunate that the nomarch of Siout gives us no clue as to the
source whence the revenues of the priests, divided into temple days, were
derived. The offerings and sacrifices made to the gods were of two kinds —
the first given irregularly by private persons, the second prescribed by the
temple regulations for set days and hours ; the latter probably constituted
the " temple days." Most probably all the customary receipts were thrown
into one fund, which was dealt with communistically— that is to say, a share
allotted by common agreement to each member of the college. Thus the
offerings brought to the temple by private persons of every degree were,
after performance of the ceremonial rites, available for the maintenance of
the priesthood ; and it seems probable that whatever lands were regarded
as belonging absolutely to the temple, would be required to bring their
produce, after the cost of cultivation was defrayed, to the temple in the
form of offerings in kind, while a similar tribute was rendered by the cities
or estates authorized to pay their taxes to the god.

But the temple estates were no more regarded as the private or corpo-
rate property of a priestly caste, than the soldiers' lands as the property of a
military caste. The priests of any sanctuary held their lands under a
trust, which was too well understood to need defining. They were ex-
pected to care "like a good father,"2 as one high priest of Amon phrases
it, for the families of the temple servants, to give food to the poor, like
other great personages, and to provide with due splendour for the service
of the gods and the maintenance of the sacred building. But if the official
salary of a priest took the form of land rather than rations, he was free to
do as he pleased with his holding, like the soldier or any private proprietor,
just as he was free to dispose of his " temple days" for the endowment of
his statue or any other purpose. He might either cultivate the land him-
self through a steward or servant, or he could let it to a cultivator, whose
rent would represent the money value of the priestly immunity from
taxation.

The former method was the more in accordance with ancient Egyptian
usage, and a letter ascribed to the reign of Mineptah I. (the thirteenth
son of Rameses II.) throws a welcome ray of light upon this part of the
1 Brugsch, Hist., i. 378. 2 /£., ii. 113.

i74 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

rural economy of the time. The scribe of the tablet of offerings, Bek-en-
Amen, writes to his father, the prophet Rameses, to report the result of his
inquiries as to the cultivation of his father's land and the prospect of
recovering the services of the Syrian slave l who had been carried off to
serve on shipboard. He informs his father that it is estimated that two
men and a youth will be required to cultivate the land in question. It is
calculated, apparently, that one labourer cultivates as much ground as will
produce 200 measures of corn. Three men and a boy — perhaps the staff
which the prophet had proposed to employ — can do 800 measures, but
the crop to be expected is 600. These measures of corn probably repre-
sent what the cultivator was expected to have to hand over to his employer,
after his own necessities were supplied ; and we may note as characteristic,
and explanatory of the characteristic stability of Egyptian economy, that
the customary calculation of dues and produce is accepted at once as final
and conclusive.

Both employers and employed are content to renew the bargain that has
always been customary between people in the same relation, and both are
spared the labour and expense of a trial of strength as to whether either
could force a more disadvantageous bargain upon the other. Such con-
servatism was naturally more of a protection to the cultivators than to the
priests, who might of course have taken advantage of the increased extent
of their landed property to raise their rents. But, down to this period,
there seems no reason to suppose that the standard of comfort, among
what we may call the working classes, had been lowered since the ancient
monarchy. On the contrary, the florid letter in which the scribe Panbesa
depicts the charms and glories of the new city, whose tutelary deity is "the
war god of the world, Ramessu-Mei-Amon," contains a significant reference
to the well-being of that class, which shows that it was not the fashion of
the age to disregard them : " the little people in the city are like the great
ones," 2 we are told ; the point of resemblance being that they have leisure
to take part both in religious festivals and in the season feasts.

After the age of Bocchoris, deeds, referring to the occupation of land
belonging to members of the priestly class, are comparatively plentiful ;
but, after the secularization of the temple property had begun, they are
not, of course, conclusive as to the state of things existing while all the
ancient customs of the country were unimpaired. A contract of the reign
of Amasis may, however, be referred to as evidence of a third kind of
arrangement, under which the priestly tenant of temple lands cultivated
them himself, but was expected to give a certain share of the produce to
the temple. In this contract a prophet of Amon cedes the land, which he
holds from the sanctuary, for a year to two choachytes (presumably his
private creditors), on condition of their paying one-third of the produce to

1 T.S.B.A., vii. 3, 411. It makes no difference for our purpose whether documents
of this kind are bond-fide private communications or passages from a polite letter-writer ;
indeed, in the latter case, they would be all the more certainly typical.

* Brugsch, Hist., ii. 92-

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 175

the temple.1 The inference is obvious that if the land were not so let, it
was normally occupied by its priestly owner, and the expenses of the
temple defrayed by a share of the produce, derived through him, from the
temple lands. The fact that such an arrangement is unknown to all other
hierarchies does not make it the less in accordance with Egyptian ideas
and customs, and the prolonged and peaceful popularity enjoyed by the
Egyptian priesthood may even be, in part, explained by this method of
causing the priest to bear the apparent expense of maintaining the service
of the gods.2

There was, however, one difference between the priests and every other
class in Egypt, brought about, as already observed, by the existence of
permanent endowments. The Egyptian theory of descent was unfavour-
able to the establishment of an hereditary aristocracy, either of a territorial
or an official character. With the exception of officials like the court
architect, whose position was almost that of high priest to the king's
person, no holder of high office could expect his son to be as great a man
as himself, unless he made his own way afresh into the king's high favour.
Lands and office could not be depended on to pass together, from father
to son, with the regularity that founds a family at once strong and rich
enough to disregard court favour. This element of permanence was pro-
vided by the temple lands alone, and here only a succession either by sons
or sons-in-law was kept up, which formed, first, something like a priestly
caste, and, ultimately, something like a rebellious priestly aristocracy.

The colleges of priests attached to the different temples of the same god
were naturally in communication with each other; they had the same
interests and the same means of influence. Kings came and went, but
the temple estates remained and grew, like the abbey lands of mediaeval
Europe. The claim which no military caste made on behalf of lapsed
soldiers' lands was, it seems, habitually put forward on behalf of the chief
temple of the god, if any smaller foundation in its neighbourhood fell out
of repair or became extinct. Temple lands did not therefore, as of course,
lapse to the king, and become again taxable, if the shrine they were
designed to support ceased to exist. The nearest or most powerful
foundation of the same sort might silently appropriate the land, in the
manner deprecated by Amenhotep the Wise.

The third kind of endowment, in which the king's liberality displays
itself at the expense of his subjects, is as old as Thothmes III., and in and
after the reign of Rameses II. it becomes comparatively common. In the
poem of Pentaur, the king counts up the benefits he has conferred upon
his father Arnon, as well as upon his warriors : " Shall it be for nothing,"
he asks, "that I have given to thee all my substance as household furni-
ture, that the whole united land has been ordered to pay tribute to thee,
that 1 have dedicated to thee sacrifices of ten thousand oxen and sweet
smelling woods ? " The king here claims credit for two distinct bene-

1 E. Revillout, Les Obligations en droit Ezyptien, p. 124.

2 In ancient Arabia, as will be seen, temple revenues were employed on city edifices.

1 76 OWNERSHIP JN EGYPT.

factions : a gift of his own personal property, and a royal edict, command-
ing the whole kingdom to pay tribute. We do not know at what date the
custom of paying tithe to the gods originated in Egypt ; if, however, it was
the custom there, as in ancient China, for a tenth of the produce only to
be paid to the Crown as land tax, every royal gift of land would necessarily
take the form of an assignment of tithe ; and, in fact, this conception of
a gift is still in force as late as the second year of Ptolemy Philometor, the
date of a deed by which a private person gave himself, his wives, servants,
children, cattle, and all his other goods to the god Serapis. The docu-
ment itself explains this to mean that he will give the tenth of all that his
year's work produces from the property so dedicated.1 Towns may have
been first called on for tithe, because they were not by custom charged
with rent ; but the presumption is that Rameses, like the devotee of Ser-
apis, gave a tenth of his movable property to the temple of Amon, and
ordered his subjects to do the same. It was usual to speak of " Thebes
of Amon," as if the city itself belonged to the god, and the extent to
which this was supposed to be the case may be taken as illustrating the
generally unburdensorae character of Egyptian ownership.

The earlier kings, like the nomarchs, identified themselves chiefly with
the worship of the tutelary god of their capital city. Rameses III., how-
ever, seems to have aimed at endowing the whole worship of the country.
The great Harris papyrus, containing the annals of the king, records first
his gifts to the deities of Thebes, then to those of Heliopolis, those of
Memphis, and then those to the " gods of the north and the south," of
whom fourteen are described as the lords of particular cities. The gifts to
Amon-ra of course take the chief place. " I have given thee," says the
king, "tens of thousands of bushels of corn to supply thy divine offerings
continually, for transporting to Western Thebes every year to fill thy gran-
aries with corn and barley. ... I planted thy city of Uas (Western
Thebes, i.e. the Necropolis) with groves and meadows and scented flowers.

. . I made to thee a noble quarter in the city on the north. . . .
I assigned to it the lands of Egypt, having their tributes, the men of every
country." " Cattle, gardens, fields, gallies, repositories, and cities" form
the bulk of the collection of things which " the living king gave to the
house of his noble father Amon Ra, king of the gods, Mut, Khonsu, and
the gods of Western Thebes."2

Erman values at about ^200,000 the revenue in precious metals alone
received during one year of this king's reign by the chief temples of Egypt,3
a sum then of course representing a much higher value than now; half a
million of cattle, six million sacks of corn, a million vessels of beer, wine,
and oil, and seven million loaves, besides smaller quantities of miscellane-
ous articles, and "169 towns" — or their revenues — are included in the
same year's income ; about three-quarters of the whole being assigned to

1 E. Revillout, Cours de droit Egyptien, i. 100.

2 Records, vi. 30.
8 Vol. ii. p. 408.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 177

the temple of Amon at Thebes, which at this time must have been five
times as rich as the great temple of Heliopolis, and ten times as rich as
that of Memphis.

The political consequences of this enormous increase in the wealth of
the Theban priesthood were not long in declaring themselves ; but it has
been suggested that the extravagant liberality of Rameses III. may have
been prompted by a sense of weakness on the king's part, making the
support of the priesthood already necessary to him, though the price paid
for it was such as to make the priests independent of the monarchy. Be-
fore this time the temples were already rich enough to be worth plundering,
and it is a plausible suggestion that the Syrian usurper Ersu (or Arisu),
who gave trouble during or after the reign of Seti II., had made an attempt
to secularize temple property.1 "He treated the gods as men, and
brought no sacrifices to the temples," as Rameses III. says; and hence
the priesthood was naturally on the side of Setnecht, "who gave holy-
property to the temples;" and the liberalities of Rameses III. may not
have been entirely spontaneous, but a return for services received. 't

The bread alone, besides the corn and other provisions named above,
represents something like a year's rations for 1,000 men, and it certainly
seems as if the provision thus made, for filling the granaries of Western
Thebes with corn and barley, should have been sufficient to obviate the
occasion for any such secession of the workpeople as took place a very
few reigns later. On the other hand, all these revenues would be none too
much if the chief priest was already engaging in political intrigues, and
building up a party for himself within the State. And as Rameses III.
was really not attached to any worship except that of his own image, his
munificence becomes more intelligible, if we regard it as the price given
for political support, though of a dangerous and damaging kind.

The chief part of the endowments described in the Harris papyrus must
have been of the second sort, in which, the king abandons to the temple
the revenue derived from the ordinary taxes. The " people " mentioned
were of course not the whole number of cultivators on the land, but either
gardeners employed in the orchards, or slaves for the service of the temple,
the inhabitants of the fields and towns experiencing no change, except
in the person of the overlord, to whom their taxes were paid. The

Jland granted in this way by rich and pious kings, and supplemented by
the private donations of nobles like Amenhotep, would of course accumu-
late from generation to generation, till the sacred lands began to rival the
royal domains in extent, especially if the precautions observed in the case
of the temple of Kak were not generally enforced. As a matter of fact,
during the Nineteenth Dynasty, if not before, the wealth of the priesthood
went on increasing, while that of the kings, if not replenished by the spoils
of conquest, was proportionately diminished. Like the Buddhist monas-
teries in China, and the Christian ones of mediaeval Europe, the Egyptian

1 /£.,i. P. 79.
P.C. N

178 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

temples began to become politically dangerous by their wealth. And with
the succession of a feeble race of kings, who did equally little for their
own glory and the gods', it is scarcely surprising to find wealthy and
ambitious priests invading the royal prerogative, and themselves offering
to restore the temples which former kings had built.

This was done by Amenhotep, chief priest of Amon, under Rameses IX. ;
and the reward granted to him by the king for his service is very signifi-
cant. " Let the taxing and usufruct of the labours of the inhabitants for
the temple of Amon-ra, the king of the gods, be placed under thy adminis-
tration. Let the full revenues be given over to thee, according to their
number. Thou shalt collect the duties. Thou shalt undertake the in-
terior administration of the treasuries, the provision houses, and of the
granaries of the temple of Amon-ra, the king of the gods, so that the
income of the heads and the hands for the maintenance of Amon-ra, the
king of the gods, may be'applied to the service." 1

This grant goes beyond ancient precedent, and is just such as would, if
repeated, have transferred an important part of the wealth of the country
from the king to the priesthood. Amenhotep is authorized to administer
the lands in question on behalf of the god, just as the royal estates are
administered on behalf of the king, whose estates had hitherto been the
only example of complete private property, as we understand it, in the
kingdom. The high priest is thus no longer a steward of the king, admin-
istering his gifts in the service of the temple ; he is to take the place of
the king, and it is by him and in his name that the gods henceforward
will receive their benefactions. After this implied revolution it is not sur-
prising to find that the next Dynasty, the Twenty-first, is founded by the
usurpation of Hirhor, the chief priest of Amon at Thebes, and the exile of
the Ramessids.

The priest kings were not successful rulers, and a more or less direct
representative of the old line was restored before long ; but from hencefor-
ward the beginning of the end of Egyptian independence is in sight.
Assyrian, Ethiopian, Persian, and Greek adventurers grasp at one or both
of the two crowns of Egypt, and the native monarchy seems to have lost
the recuperative power which had formerly enabled great dynasties to rise
after long reaches of anarchy and civil war. It seems as if the simple fabric
of Egyptian society could not survive the shock to its equilibrium, given by
the crystallization of a class interest, with privileges subversive of the exist-
ing equilibrium in the distribution of wealth.

In spite of occasional restorations, the whole period following this
Twenty-first Dynasty may be called the age of the foreigners, and during
this time the antagonism between Church and State, which is so familiar
elsewhere, seems for the first time to have made itself felt in Egypt. After
the first successful usurpation of the royal prerogative by the priesthood, it
is probable that silent encroachments added to the number of the estates
claimed in absolute ownership by it, so that the wealth and independence

1 Brugsch, Hist,, ii. 180.

THE NATIONAL RELIGION AND THE PRIESTHOOD. 179

of the class increased even in times of national disaster. The " show face
festivals," when the gods were carried in procession, gave the priests the
opportunity of conciliating the populace by the entertaining magnificence
of their displays, just as the rich citizens of Greece used to secure popu-
larity by the splendid celebration of games or processions, and it is signifi-
cant of a serious economic change, when the expense of public pageantry
came to be borne by private persons, or even by a single class, instead of
by the king alone. Diodorus tells us that in his own day some feeders of
the sacred animals were known to have spent as much as 100 talents on
the funeral of one j1 an expenditure which would, of course, be set down to
the credit of those who actually carried it out, while the original " founder
and benefactor," who provided the revenues of the shrine, might be for-
gotten.

The wealth of the priesthood probably contributed as much as the
natural impiety of King Ahmes (Amasis) to instigate the attacks upon the
sacred lands to which reference has already been made. The secularization
of the temple lands, and the settlement upon them of the king's mercenary
troops, must have been intended as a direct check upon the power of the
priests, as well as a convenient financial expedient.2 The blow was too
much for the patriotism of some members of the hierarchy, who were won
over by the conciliatory policy of Darius. A son of the high priest of
Sais, who had been dispossessed of his functions and transferred to the
navy by Amasis, on account of his relationship to Apries, was restored to
the chief priesthood by Cambyses,3 and had sufficient influence with him
to get the foreigners banished from the sacred territory. The first
Ptolemy was equally desirous of securing the goodwill of the hierarchy, and
his descendants were taught to see the danger of rousing its hostility.
Still the patriotic revolt against Ptolemy Philopator was not successful, and
though later kings built temples, and even increased the number of the
ancient sacerdotal tribes, the tendency throughout the Ptolemaic period
was to reclaim as much as possible of the lands alienated to the temples,
and to reassert the royal authority over those not reclaimed, by subjecting
them to special new taxation.

The tax imposed upon the temple endowments under the Ptolemies was
a complication quite alien to the spirit of Pharaonic legislation, as it was
virtually a tax upon a tax, like the rating of rate-supported schools in con-
temporary England ; but the measure was an exact counterpart of the
action of Mehemet Ali in levying an impost of about half the regular land
tax on all Waqf lands ; that is to say, those left as an unalienable legacy to
any mosque or school. The analogy was carried a step further when
Mehemet confiscated the land, and granted annuities instead, for the
maintenance of the religious foundations ; just as, under the Ptolemies, the
priesthood was finally deprived of any right to levy its own taxes, and made

1 i- 84, 5-

2 Revue Egyptologique, i. 57 ff.
3

3 Cf. ante, p. 53

i8o OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

dependent upon an allowance granted out of the public revenues. Indeed,
the donations of the later kings to particular temples, or to the priesthood
generally, often took the form of a charge to such and such an amount
(500 talents on one occasion)1 upon the revenues derived from the house
tax, poll tax, or other special impost.

1 Revue Egyptologiqm, iii. 108.

CHAPTER VII.
CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM.

IT has been already explained that the seclusion of Egypt from foreign
influences, which was desired both by the prejudices of the people and the
principles of the Government, was not endangered by commercial inter-
course, because, so far as Egypt was concerned, such commercial inter-
course was conducted by wandering merchants, or by the servants of the
king under his instructions, not for the private profit of any class of the
native population. Ancient Egypt, like modern China, did not have to go
abroad to seek a market for her wares ; other nations were ready and
anxious to bring to her ports such of their productions as her rulers might
be willing to accept, but they did not readily obtain a footing in the
country ; and while they carried away countless flattering reminiscences of
Egyptian art and wisdom, they exercised no corresponding influence upon
the land they visited. Internal trade was always of the simplest kind, the
raw material being produced and the manufactured articles sold, as often
as not, by the same persons, whether upon a large scale or a small, by great
landowners or petty artisans.

The Egyptians were not a nation of traders, and we must go to Babylon
or China to trace the full development of commercial law under the
domestic civilizations. Egyptian law recognises sales and loans, but the
customs respecting both have retained a curious, half-artificial simplicity.
As the political government of the country excludes as far as possible all
complex relationships and reciprocal obligations, so the private contracts
recognised are made as far as possible one-sided in form.

In the earliest contracts which have reached us, it is evident that the
scribe has written down just what the contracting parties would have said
before written deeds were introduced ; the formula is always : I, So-and-so,
son of So-and-so, whose mother is Such-an-one, say, etc. In ancient
Egypt, as in Rome, commercial transactions were originally effected by
word of mouth, and the proof or record of them was preserved in the
memory of eye and ear-witnesses to the bargain. But even the simple act
of buying and selling may be conceived in different ways.

The Roman stretched out his hand, and said, " This is mine " (perhaps
primitively, with the suggestion, I took it with this hand and spear), adding
afterwards, " I have bought it with weight and scales." In Egypt, on the
other hand, the vendor speaks, while the purchaser remains passive : "I
have given thee so-and-so ; it is thine," says the former owner, and goes on

1 82 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

to stipulate penalties against himself and his descendants if they question
the validity of the transfer, and, moreover, to engage to secure the pur-
chaser in peaceable possession against the rest of the world. It is signifi-
cant of national temperament that the Egyptians conceive the prime agent
as giving, while the Romans think of him as taking, but both one-sided
terms show an uncommercial indifference to the incessant reciprocities of
trade. The Ninevite formula sums up the whole transaction, giving due
prominence to each element in it: "The price has been paid; the pur-
chaser has examined the goods ; they have been delivered to him and
accepted ; " and with the record of these successive steps, the transaction
is legally complete.

The Egyptians were backward to grasp in this way the essential features
common to all sales; like the Romans, the dealings which occupied most
space in their thoughts were those affecting real property, and other sales
followed the analogy of this. As a result, M. Revillout is able to claim
for the Egyptians the invention of a somewhat metaphysical and compli-
cated conception — that, namely, of a mortgage or pledge without possession.1
There were always two parts to a sale in Egypt — that of the ownership and
the use ; prima facie, a sale only transferred the abstract ownership, and
the purchaser might at the same time buy a field or a house, and borrow
the price — which it was not convenient for him to pay — from the vendor :
a sort of transaction which helped to favour the Egyptian habit of regarding
every obligation or liability as a kind of debt or loan. If it was intended
to make a complete transfer of the whole interest, a second deed was re-
quired transferring the occupation or use of the thing sold, and in this deed
the vendor says "thy house" to the person who has already bought the
abstract ownership.2

It does not appear that any profit attached to this abstract ownership,
except conditionally. The proprietor who had, as we should say, mort-
gaged his house, whether to the former owner or any one else, did not
necessarily pay interest on the loan, nor enter into any agreement to pay
it off by instalments; but if he died without repaying, the mortgagee took
possession ; instead of the natural heirs, unless they discharged the former
liability. This was done by buying back from the mortgagee the "writing
for money," the cent pour argent, as it was called, which the nominal vendor
gave as security for the price or loan. On giving back this writing, the
late mortgagee in his turn undertakes to hold the owner secure against all
molestation. Transactions of this kind were very frequent ; and hence,
without ceasing to occupy, the real proprietors of land may cease for a
time to be counted among the owners named in lists of boundaries.

This Egyptian form of mortgage stands midway between two very
different developments of the central idea. Theoretically, the Roman
distinction between dominium and possession, which may exist conjointly
or apart, seems based upon a similar conception of ownership apart from

1 Les obligations en droit Egyptien, p. 66.

2 /£., p. 96.

CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM. 183

use ; and in practice the mandpatio cum fidntia, recognised by Roman law,
is an attempt to translate the same kind of usage into terms of the tradi-
tional vocabulary of the jurists. In its origin, however, the Egyptian form
of mortgage must be most nearly related to another very rational and
convenient usage most developed in ancient Babylonia, and introduced by
traders into Greece under the name of antichresis. In Babylonia and
Egypt, as in all simple agricultural communities, land passed naturally
from father to children, and was regarded rather as family than as personal
property ; the right of relatives to redeem such family property evidently
existed in both countries, and when the custom of selling outright became
common, it was necessary to bar this claim in express terms. But before
any one had thought of the possibility of alienating family land altogether,
it happened often enough that persons possessing land wanted money ; and
it may be doubted whether any more ingenious method of raising money
on land has been invented in the last 4,000 years, than that first adopted
by the Akkadians.

The essence of an antichretic bargain is the exchange of use. The
capitalist does not lend his money at interest, nor the landowner sell or
let his land, but they exchange their two possessions pro tern., the use of
the money being set against the use of the land. In this way the idea of
ownership as distinct fro-m use grew up easily and naturally, for the owner-
ship might, and often did, continue for generations to belong to one family,
while its use remained with another, without the right of the former, to
reclaim the land by repaying the money, lapsing. In Egypt, trade and
commerce being comparatively undeveloped, a landowner in difficulties
did not think of taking temporarily to trade as a means of paying off a
loan, nor, therefore, could he give up the use of his land as a security for
the debt. On the other hand, it would not of itself have occurred to the
Egyptians to give the name of sale to a transaction which did not convey
the use of the land, and was not intended to result in conveying the
ownership. In Malabar, where counterparts to other peculiar features of
Egyptian custom still survive, there are several stages in the process of
sale, the last of which takes place when the owner of land has parted with
every shred of his interest in it except a bare titular or abstract right.

The position of the absolute owner who had not bought the right of use
or occupancy was something like that of a ground landlord in England,
except that he received no rent, and was liable to have his reversionary
right bought back whenever the other party, who may be called debtor or
tenant as we please, could raise money to pay off the price or loan. Use
and ownership must have been separated, in fact, before even the wisdom
of the Egyptians could have hit upon the bright idea of pledging the
ownership, when it was not convenient to surrender the use, and yet some
security was needed to borrow upon.

This explanation of the usage seems more consistent with its actual
working than the supposition that the ownership or dominium was vested
in, and liable to be sold by, some other person than the cultivator, such as

184 .OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

a feudal superior or overlord, whose interest might be sold without disturb-
ing the occupier. The form of the transaction naturally suggests to us
something of this kind, but in the existing deeds there is always provision
made for the completion of the sale under certain conditions, and the
vendor binds himself to cede the ownership as well as the use if they
befall. Obviously the person who may need to borrow money on the
security of his land is not the great officer, who receives the land tax as
piy, nor the wealthy proprietor, whose land is cultivated by servants under
stewards, who bring in to his coffers all the produce, after the workers
have been fed, and the dues of the king and the temple paid. Then, as
now, it would be the little peasant, " having a field," who seeks to pledge
it, and who, in ancient Egypt, might reasonably hope to pay off the debt,
out of the proceeds of his industry, so long as its amount was not increased
by accumulating interest.

The bargain was more advantageous to the cultivator than those that
have generally been open to that class ; but it was not altogether one-sided.
The capitalist who expects to live upon the interest of his investments is a
creation of quite recent times, and the Egyptians were not peculiar in rest-
ing content when their small hoards were deposited in safe keeping. In
commercial Mesopotamia, both bankers and borrowers abounded, the latter
ready to pay interest for the money lent them, out of the profits they could
make by trading with it, and the former ready to take care of any private
treasures entrusted to them, while their professional character was security
enough for its being delivered up when called for. This was not the case
in Egypt, and the security offered by an antichretic quasi-sale or mortgage
\\as therefore attractive enough ; the money was sure to be repaid in full,
or if not, its full value in land represented a satisfactory equivalent, which,
moreover, could by no possibility be either lost or stolen.

A form of bargain exactly answering to the Babylonian exchange of land
and capital is in use in China, where it is known by the name of tien or
"contract." The ordinary commercial interest is 30 per cent, per annum
or 3 per cent, per mensem as a maximum ; but in recent times, at all
events, money invested in land or houses is only expected to bring in 9 or
10 per cent. ; so that it would always pay a landowner better to sell his
land and trade with the money, than to borrow, at interest, to defray the
cost of cultivation. But land, being a solid and permanent provision, the
Chinese are reluctant to alienate it for the sake of temporary accommoda-
tion; hence the arrangement described by Amyotin his Memoir on Interest
in China,1 from which it appears that the Chinese must have either re-
invented, or always known, this most characteristic institution of the black-
headed commercial race.

In Amyot's time, supposing a man had land worth 6,800 ounces of silver
(the illustration is his own), and wished to borrow 6,000, he could give the
title-deeds of his property to the lender, endorsed with a receipt for the

1 Memoires concernant les Chinois, vol. iv. p. 299. Cf. post, Book ii. ch. v. § 2, Bk. iii.
ch. x., and Appendix. "Welsh Mortgages."

CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM. 185

money, after which the creditor treats the land as his own, taking his
chance of the returns. He is not, unless it is specially so stipulated, liable
for substantial repairs to the property so held, but risks from flood or such-
like natural calamities fall on him, as the debtor can leave the lands on
his hands for good by simply omitting to repay the money. Generally the
agreement is made for a set term, after which the debtor may free himself
when he pleases. The mortgagor cannot sell the land, but he can transfer
his rights, such as they are, to any other person.

The mortgagee gains, as his money goes further than it would in buying
land outright, and he is frequently allowed to retain the land for which he
has paid down less than its full value. The mortgagor gains also, since the
difference between the selling price and the loan enables him to keep his
hold upon the land, which he can acquire afresh at any time for less than
it would cost him to buy elsewhere. Such pledges are handed down from
father to son for a century together, without the right of redemption laps-
ing. If, however, a family despairs of redeeming the property pledged,
they can either arrange to sell the balance of their interest to the occupier,
or sell outright to a third party and pay off the loan, keeping the difference
between its amount and the price.

Without laying stress upon the Chinese form of this ancient Babylonian
bargain as an argument for community of race, we may certainly treat the
fuller explanations which we get of its modern working as illustrative of the
scantier Egyptian documents. The acceptability of this sort of exchange
in the three countries where it became customary rested in each case upon
different considerations. In Babylonia the exceptional fertility of the soil,
coupled with the existence of a large and wealthy urban population, made
agriculture, perhaps for the only time in history, almost as remunerative as
commerce or manufactures. Land was neither despised as a source of
wealth, nor monopolised as a source of power ; it circulated as nearly as
possible like other values, and its owners and cultivators seem to have been
further removed, than the same class in any other community, from a doom
of drudgery, so ill-rewarded as to make any series of bad seasons ruinous.

In Egypt a similar result was secured by the scarcity of competing
investments, and as real wages were high in proportion to profits, the
cultivators who had mortgaged a small property antichretically, so as to
escape the accumulation of interest, had a chance of redeeming it by saving
their earnings as carriers, boatmen, or artisans. Opposite causes led to the
same advantageous result, and, as a fact, in both countries the cultivators
retained their hold upon the soil, and were not deprived of their vested in-
terest in the Commonwealth by the play of self-interested enterprise on the
part of skilled money-makers. In China, where the chronic difficulties of
ancient and modern societies have presented themselves on the largest
scale, the tendency of money-makers to aggrandize themselves at the
expense of food-producers has made itself felt repeatedly ; and the ten-
dency of agricultural profits to a minimum, and of the profits of speculation
— or of traffic in values of secondary utility — to a maximum, has only

1 86 OWNERSHIP JN EGYPT.

been checked with difficulty by customary law, the fixed principles of the
governing class, and the tone of public opinion which has been fostered
by consistent legislation in restraint of accumulation.

It is easy to realize the extent of the boon conferred on the cultivator
by an antichretic mortgage by imagining the case of an Irish peasant with-
out money enough either to cultivate, to improve, or to emigrate. In Egypt
or China such a man might borrow seven-eighths of the value of his land,
surrendering the land itself pro teui. as an equivalent ; the money so raised
would take him to New York and give him a start in business, where, in a
few years, he could earn money enough to pay off the loan, and buy the
stock needed for the cultivation of the land besides, while the land itself
would still be his own and unburdened.

The existence of this singular and characteristic form of bargain in
China tempts us to look for other points of resemblance with Egyptian
usage, and to conjecture that the Chinese distinction, between selling a
house and selling the ground it stands upon, is a reminiscence of the
Egyptian distinction between ownership and use. It is, however, more
probably only an accidental consequence of the previous distinction. In
the appeal of the Egyptian workmen to Amenhotep,1 there is a suggestion
of the same distinction; and it is evident that, when land without buildings
is mortgaged, the mortgagee may wish to erect some, and, at the same
time, would not be expected, by customary law in which equity prevailed,
to forfeit the buildings if the land was reclaimed. Obviously, then, he would
assert his right to sell or remove them when his occupancy of the land
ceased ; and thus in a very short time it might come to pass that the ab-
stract ownership of a site by one party, and the ownership of the buildings
on it in use by another, might change hands quite independently. And
this is probably what occurred in Egypt, where, it should be noted, no
deeds relating to the sale of lands are met with before the reign of Darius.2

A curious proof of the persistency of custom amongst the Hamitic
peoples is supplied by the fact that the Kabyle tribes of the present day
still use forms of sale, which are evidently derived from the ancient
Egyptian and Babylonian antichresis, in spite of their being expressly
forbidden by Moslem law. Many of these tribes have written customary
codes, singularly similar to those of the Basque communes on the one
hand, while on the other, they present, in many respects, curious analogies
to Egyptian and Chinese custom. In the first of the two forms of sale
alluded to, the vendor reserves the right, if the purchaser wishes to sell at
any future time, of buying back the property alienated, at a price to be
fixed by a third person ; in the other, he reserves the right to buy back at
the original price, under the same conditions, and this claim passes to the
heirs of the first vendor. In some villages this contract supersedes the
chefaa, or right of pre-emption generally reserved to relatives, clansmen, or
fellow-villagers.3

1 Ante, p. 59. 2 G. Paturet, Condition juridique de lafemme, p. 36.

3 La Kabylie et les Coutumes Kabyles> ii. 401. MM. Hanoteau and Letourneaux.
Paris, 1872.

CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM. 187

Another favourite form of agreement only differs from the antichresis in
applying equally to any kind of property. It is called Rahnia} and by
it the creditor has the use of the object surrendered, and is responsible for
its general safe keeping, though he is not required to make good the results
of extraordinary accidents. If no term has been fixed beforehand, the
creditor may claim enjoyment long enough to make good the value of the
advance. The custom of the village rules in such cases, and decides, for
example, that cattle pledged must be left to the creditor till the ploughing
season is over. When the term fixed for repayment expires, the debtor
must find a new lender, or the original one may claim to have the goods
sold and his advance repaid out of the price. In one tribe the rahnia runs
normally for three years ; in some villages the chefda extends to the pro-
perty pledged in rahnia, but this is rare. The creditor must use the pledge
thriftily, or he is liable for damages ; the fruits of the season are his, but
not the trees or other fixtures, and he cannot build or demolish without
the owner's consent. Though nominally Mahommedans, the Kabyles do
not trouble themselves about the Koran, when its precepts are in conflict
with their hereditary national habits ; and, in fact, the prohibition of usury
in a Semitic people has a history and tendency, which make it quite beside
the mark when directed against the exchange of use of two commodities,
even though one of these consists of money. In a few tribes the legal
interest is fixed, as in Egypt, at 33 per cent.2

As the authors of the work referred to observe, the principle of r argent
marchandise is accepted in its fullest extent by the Kabyles, who also
resemble the early inhabitants of Babylonia in their genius for associa-
tion, and in their readiness to regard values of every conceivable kind as
exchangeable. Common articles of furniture are hired or rented ; the ex-
change of services of different kinds is common, as, for instance, the labour
of a man for that of a mule, or the work of a carpenter for that of a culti-
vator. The loan of labour, called touiza, is purely voluntary, but it is a
point of honour to pay back the equivalent.3 An infinite number of forms
of partnership exist for the cultivation of the soil ; there are partnerships
extending to all the transactions of the parties in perpetuity, and others
limited to a particular kind of operation or a single speculation. Wood-
man and smith are often in partnership, the former providing fuel for the
forge and handles for the tools of the latter. Women rear ducks and hens
in partnership, besides carrying on various domestic industries and manu-
factures. Local tradition avers that the tribes now addicted to trade
have been so from all time, and if, as the character of their commercial
legislation shows, they were traders before the spread of Arabs to the
west, their usages can be derived from no more modern school than that
of Egypt or Phoenicia.

1 La Kabylie et les Coittumes Kabyles, vol. ii. p. 534.

2 16. , vol. ii. p. 494.

8 Somewhat similar usages prevailed in Brittany (/.<:., vol. ii. p. 498), perhaps, like
the kindred customs of the Irish and Basques, due to the partial survival of a pre-
Aryan race.

i88 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT,

It may have been owing to Arab influence that, in these rahnia pledges,
the use of the article pledged is only set against the interest of the loan,
not, as was sometimes the case in Egypt, against the principal as well.
There was, of course, very little difference between letting and mortgaging
land, when the mortgagee received as his security the present use and
profit, instead of the abstract or reversionary rights of ownership. In
Egypt such bargains always referred to real property, and most commonly
to houses or town lots, not subject to inundation, which were ceded for a
term, equivalent to the value received : in one Ptolemaic deed, land is
ceded for a specified term of three years, in exchange for a sum of money
paid over by instalments in the course of the preceding nine years; and in
another, a similar arrangement extinguishes the liability for payments
spread over sixteen years. The owner of the land guarantees the creditor
against disturbance during the lease, but a penalty is prescribed if it is
not given up at the end of the term, and no compensation is given for
improvements.1

Some acts in favour of creditors, of the time of Amasis, have the form
of leases, though their only object is to secure the money due ; and in a
less degree we find in Egypt the same sort of commercial flexibility as
that which is so remarkable in Babylonia ; the same readiness to view the
parties to a transaction in any character, and to estimate and exchange
what we should consider quite disparate values, which resulted in both
countries in giving the little people of commerce their fair share of favour-
able arrangements.

When land was let for cultivation, not as a disguised mortgage, the tenure
was yearly, but in such cases renewal was contemplated, as shown by the
phrase, " You represent So-and-so in the fields in question, for all the time
you are cultivating them."2 It is very probable that native usage gave a
kind of customary fixity of tenure to such tenant cultivators, who could
only be numerous upon the estates of wealthy nobles or landowners. In
a lease of the reign of Ptolemy Philopator, that is, after the influx of Jews
and Greeks had made itself felt for evil in the economy of Egypt, the
cultivator who receives the land for one year is expressly forbidden to say,
" I rented it now, in order to do so always hereafter ; " and the stipulation
is itself the best proof that the right to renew was generally exercised or
claimed. In this agreement, the tenant undertakes to pay a fifth of the
produce to the landlord for himself, and a fifth for the agent of the king
and the god, thus retaining three-fifths for himself, which is intermediate
between the two-thirds, and the half allowed in other deeds.3

Sometimes the arrangement is a pure metayage, profits and expenses
being shared ; sometimes the cultivator's share is brought virtually to half
by his undertaking to pay one-fifth to the feudal owner (a temple), one-fifth
to the quasi-proprietor or landlord (a priest), to which in ordinary cases
one- tenth would have to be added for the royal dues, though if the quasi-

1 Les obligations en droit Egyptien, p. 127.

2 /&, p. 120. 3 Ib.t p. 130.

CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM. 189

proprietor in such cases cultivated himself, he would get seven-tenths of
the produce. The number of private landlords increases as we approach
the Roman period, the ownership of the temple lands passing into the
market, when a State allowance out of the general revenue was substituted
for the old endowments.

From an agreement entered into between one Phib, a pastophore,1 and
an officer of finance, in the reign of Ptolemy Euergetes, it seems as if
even the old-fashioned system of cultivation by stewards now required the
sanction of written agreements ; for the occupier here only undertakes to
cultivate and pay taxes for a certain field, pertaining to the sacred domain
of Amon for one year, and he is bound to give all the produce honestly —
so that his wages do not consist of a portion of the crops — and not to
appeal to divine temples, altars, or images, as contentious cultivators do.2
The frequency of such stipulations as the latter is very significant ; and in
the same period of degeneracy, we find that the old customary partnership,
between the owner and the cultivator, of which Pharaoh himself set the
example, was no longer recognised, and a fixed rent of so many measures
of corn was required to be paid, whether there was an inundation — and
consequently a crop — or not.

It has been observed that the annual inundation made a permanent
system of landmarks necessary to enable the holders to reclaim their own
plots. An inscription of the reign of Rameses VI. shows very clearly how
plots of land were described and identified. Several estates or fields are
bequeathed by an official to maintain the service "of the statue of the
king," and the boundary of each district on the north, south, east, and
west is circumstantially described ; "the great mountain," "the river," "the
papyrus field of Pharaoh," " the field of the keeper of the herds," " the
gravelly fields " of a local governor, and " the fields with potter's earth,"
belonging to Pharaoh, are some of the boundaries enumerated.3 The
superficial area of the land is stated in each case ; and it may be observed
that in all, the dimensions given seem to indicate a long narrow strip, as
if the holdings were generally shaped like the ploughlands, or acres of so
many of the barbarian colonists of Western Europe.

The registration of the inhabitants in their various callings carried out in
view of the public charges to which they were liable,4 must have resulted in
some sort of registration of the lands, as well as the cultivators. The
peasant who was entered as occupying a particular plot, and as therefore
liable for such and such dues to the king and the god, had his lawful
occupancy thereby officially recorded, so that the temple registers came to
serve as family title deeds. Thus, in the time of Philopator, a litigant
named Hermias established his claim to the possession of certain wheat-
fields (which some one else had sold), by proving that his grandfather was
entered as their owner on the temple registers, this circumstance being held
conclusive in the absence of any equally official record of their legal sale.5

1 Rev. Egyptologique, iv. 138. 2 Cours de droit, p. 93. 3 Brugsch, Hist., ii. 174.
4 Cours de droit > p. 118. 5 /£., p. 128, and Le Proces de Hermias, p. 7.

1 90 O WNERSHIP IN EG YPT.

The public notary, who is so conspicuous a person in the Ptolemaic
period, gradually inherited the functions of the scribes of the temple, and
ended of course by becoming a mere employee of the State. In the latter
years of the monarchy, when sales of land became common, and the
temple dues were merged in the general taxes, a special tax was levied on
both sales and successions,1 so that, unless the heir or purchaser had
himself entered, as the owner of the acquired property, in the public
registers, his future acts in administering it were rendered null and void,
or, at least, voidable by any one producing a better title. After the
Twenty-sixth or Ethiopian Dynasty, when the writing of private deeds
begins, there is no doubt that such registers were written, ultimately indeed
twice over, viz. in Greek and demotic ; but it is not certain that during
the days of Egyptian greatness any corresponding records were kept in
writing. If they had been, some specimens of such documents could
hardly have failed to reach us, and in their absence we are almost compelled
to suppose, what is not in itself incredible, that the temples served as
official repositories for traditional knowledge, rather than written proof
concerning the ownership of land and kindred matters. Hieroglyphic, like
Chinese writing makes such severe demands upon the memory, that that
faculty becomes highly trained amongst all members of the literary class,
and, as in peaceful times, before land was regarded as saleable, changes of
ownership would be few, the record of them might be kept, safely enough
for practical purposes, in the breast of the holy fathers.

Agricultural land is hardly ever sold in primitive communities, and in
Egypt it does not appear that the position of the cultivator was sufficiently
desirable to cause money to change hands in consideration of the transfer
of the kind of tenant right, which was all that the peasant had to sell.
Hence properties would remain practically in the same hands from genera-
tion to generation, and whoever knew the genealogies of the country
people would know what land they tilled. In most cases, both kinds of
knowledge would be common property to all the village; and when a
doubtful or difficult point arose by way of exception, the verdict of a
priestly college, after the parties and their witnesses had sworn, would be
accepted, either as a just judgment or a divine oracle.

Arrangements were made for the preservation of some documents, as is
proved by the survival of those relating to State trials, including one that is
endorsed "to be copied," or "to be preserved in the governor's archives."
Such documents were kept in sealed earthenware vessels,2 and mention is
made in one place, by the librarian, of his having looked over, and counted
those in his charge. Records of judgments ,or pleadings, in the case of
private citizens, have also been preserved, but only, so far as we can judge,
in the case of disputes which had been decided by the courts. It almost
seems as if no record was kept of non-contentious business ; friendly
contracts were concluded and observed without written witness ; but if, by
the default of either party, a transaction was brought into court, the
.\ Cours de droit, p. 125. 2 Erman, &g. u. ,^£^., Leben, p. 167.

CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM. 191

proceedings took a quasi-criminal character; and records of criminal pro-
ceedings were preserved.1 In the Lee papyrus, which treats of the sentence
on criminals found guilty of sorcery and high treason, reference is made to
" the sacred writings,'1 which command the infliction of such a penalty ;
but while the passage stands alone, it is not absolutely certain that " the
writings of the divine words " in question were law books.

A curious custom met with as late as the eighth century A.D. shows
the existence of a strong predisposition to " take a person's word " for
facts bearing on their legal claims, in a way that is only to be accounted for
by a long, ingrained habit of scrupulous affirmation. Failing other evidence,
the solemn oath of an interested party was admitted even in support of
his own claim, and accepted as conclusive by the other side.2 The number
of witnesses subsequently required for written deeds (in some cases as many
as sixteen), probably reproduces the number required to receive the verbal
statement which constituted the earliest legal acts. The substitution of
written deeds for verbal contracts before witnesses was most probably
connected with the introduction of demotic writing. The new character,
if it did not modify the language and grammar of the country, at least put
on record the alterations which the spoken language had already experi-
enced j 3 it aimed at reproducing directly the sounds of modern speech,
and escaped at once from all the limitations imposed by the ancient literary
language with its stereotyped forms, fixed by the sacred character, and no
doubt becoming, with it, less and less intelligible as the centuries went by.

It is strange, perhaps, that a nation, so much given to the writing of
records, should have had no written records kept of the private business
transactions and civil contracts of individuals, while such documents in
Babylonia begin nearly as soon as the inscriptions of kings. It must be
remembered, however, that Egyptian hieroglyphs are much more primitive
in form than the earliest cuneiforms, so that the ancestors of the Egyptians
may have left the cradle-land of letters, before the stage of development had
been reached, in which the art of writing is used for civil contracts. The
copiousness of the early deeds of Babylonia is, indeed, more remarkable
and exceptional than the dearth of corresponding documents in ancient
Egypt ; and if the Egyptians did not bring with them the habit of writing
such memoranda when they entered the valley of the Nile, there are
reasons which may explain its not having been formed there till after the
lapse of over two thousand years.

When the making of bargains is the professional occupation of a large
class, single transactions cannot be left to the memory, and it becomes
necessary, to avoid the double chance of fraud or error, that a durable
record of every transaction should be made at the time, and preserved for
future reference. But, as farmers are the last class to take to scientific

1 In the table of precedence the superiors of the scribes of the rolls of the great court
are said to register j:he decrees of the national judges. (Maspero, loc. cit., p. 328.)

2 Revue Ezyptologique, 1882, p. 72.

3 E. Revillout, Cours de droit Egyptian, vol. i. V Etat des personnes, p. 9.

i92 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

book-keeping, a conservative agricultural population can exist for a long
time without using the writer's art.

The introduction of written deeds was an innovation, and the Greeks
were given to understand that legislative reforms, in the popular interest, were
effected at about the same time as this innovation. The Memphite king,
Bok-en-ranf, who is identified with Bocchoris, succeeded the Twenty-second
Dynasty, which supplanted the usurping priestly line. His reign, therefore,
falls at a time when the power of the priesthood as a disinterested social
mediator was at a minimum. During the Twenty-first Dynasty, which had
Thebes for its capital, the high priest was of the royal family, and all the
influence of the class was enlisted on the side of the dynasty, instead of in
favour of popular, social, and religious conceptions. We do not know how
far the internal affairs of the country were affected by the revolution, which
placed Shishaks and Sargons on the throne of the Pharaohs, but if the
priests were the natural guardians of legal tradition, and the authorities for
legal custom, the records of such customs were evidently most in danger,
when the abdication by the priests of their proper work, and the failure of
their political ambition, had paved the way for foreign rule ; during which
neither native custom nor its guardians could expect anything save repres-
sion and neglect.

Lawlessness and oppression probably prevailed, and oppression may
have taken advantage of the breakdown of the constitutional securities,
respected by native rulers, to veil new abuses under the form of law.
Tradition makes Bocchoris the friend of the poor, and not of the priest-
hood ; while the statements of Diodorus and the analogy of China would
lead us to conceive the ancient priesthood as the guardians of the ortho-
dox theory of the ruler's duties to his people. But the priests could not
reassume this role immediately after their representative had won and lost
the royal crown ; and it was open meanwhile for a restorer of the native
monarchy to claim for the Crown the role rashly abandoned by the Church.
The priesthood was the nearest approach to a dangerous aristocracy in
Egypt, and a coalition between king and people, against such an aristo
cracy, is a familiar incident, whenever the balance of power between dif-
ferent estates of the realm has begun to oscillate.

The adoption at the same time of a new character, more available for
secular purposes than the old Hieratic, would make it easy for the king to
codify and publish the whole body of customary law, previously reserved
for the knowledge and administration of the priesthood. M. Revillout
justly compares this to the revolution effected in Rome when the mysteries
of the patrician formulas were first divulged.1 In themselves, none of the
measures ascribed to Bocchoris were opposed to the interests or traditions
of the priesthood, but he was accused of impiety, and his government met
with so little support that he ended miserably in the hands of an Ethiopian
conqueror.

The loss of power and privileges which the native hierarchy suffered
1 Cours de droit Egyptien, p. 47.

CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM, 193

almost continuously down to the fall of Egyptian independence was both
begun and facilitated by the secularization of law ; and whether this result
was intended or not by the king, it was probably foreseen by the priests,
and not resented the less because it may have been provoked by their own
remissness in protecting the poorer cultivators. Bocchoris is said to have
abolished imprisonment for debt, and the selling debtors for slaves ; and to
have fixed the rate of interest at 30 per cent, while forbidding the accumula-
tion of interest beyond the original amount of the debt ; he also allowed the
debtor to clear himself by oath in the absence of written proof of his lia-
bility ; and in this way also the introduction of written deeds is represented
as effected in the popular interest. The teachings of the old morality had
perhaps lost their hold upon the owners of wealth, some of whom may
have been foreigners engaged in trade. Money-lenders at any rate had
become a source of danger, and the form of the remedial measure points
to the existence of the same sort of abuse, as has prevailed under Eng-
lish rule in India, and in modern Egypt, where usurers multiply at their
own discretion the liabilities of the illiterate peasant.

Probably the real customary law of the country was on the same lines
as the edicts of Bok-en-ranf; the professional money-lender, like the pro-
fessional banker, is the first to need to have his dealings controlled by
documentary evidence : but unlike traders, who meet their fellow-traders
upon equal terms, the one professional lender has to do with a number of
what may be called amateur borrowers, whom it is easy to terrorize or de-
fraud. Before the rise of such a class, the account of small loans between
neighbours was probably trusted to the joint memories of the parties, and
in the event of dispute, an oath given at the nearest temple was held
conclusive. Professional money-lenders, profiting by the political diffi-
culties of the priesthood, may have repudiated this method of decision,
and the laws of Bocchoris were admirably devised to secure to the
peasants the protection of either Church or State, of the king or the
gods, against the claims of fraudulent or extortionate creditors.

The sons of Kush were, if anything, more addicted than the Egyptians
to the secular use of letters, and the earliest surviving deeds date from the
Ethiopian dynasty, which probably therefore allowed the laws of Bocchoris
to continue in force. We may be certain that new laws promulgated by an
unsuccessful under-king would not have been adopted by successive and
originally hostile dynasties ; but the codification of old native custom
secured it against infraction, either through the selfishness of private indi-
viduals or the ignorance of foreign rulers.

It is curious that while the legal rate of interest was fixed at 30 per cent.,
that for loans of agricultural produce was left at the higher rate, perhaps
fixed by ancient custom, of 33^ per cent.1 The Kabyle custom (which fixes
the term for a rahnia pledge at three years, taken in conjunction with this
rate of interest), the Chinese law on the subject (which is identical with that
of Bocchoris), and one ancient Babylonian contract,2 combine to suggest
1 Les obligations en droit Egyptien, p. 70. 2 See below, Book II. ch. v. § 3.

P.C. O

194 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

that the domestic races, before their separation, had excogitated the idea
of loans as granted for a standard term of three years, one-third of which
was to be paid off each year in the form of interest, and the original sum
repaid at the end of the time. The interest was supposed to represent the
real value, to the borrower, of the thing borrowed during the time he had it
in use, as the prevalence of antichretic bargains shows.

It is difficult for a primitive race to conceive the idea of land as an
exchangeable property, and at the same time these born traffickers had
already, in prehistoric times, equalled, or even surpassed, the ingenuity of
modern Europe in converting values of every sort into negotiable "effects."
But underlying all this commercial enterprise, there was, to all appearance,
a solid conservative prejudice that a man should keep such property as he
had. If he lent it for three years, he expected to have it back at the end
of them, and the assimilation of land to other capital, which occurs inevit-
ably among a commercial people, was effected in this way : land did not
become a fugitive and insecure possession like money, but money was
expected to be as constant to its owner as land.

Loans in kind, to be repaid at a specified date, were common in Egypt ;
for instance, so many measures of corn or oil to be repaid at the next
harvest ; and there can be little doubt that the first loans bearing interest
were of this kind. While land and game are still plentiful enough to be
had for the taking, the capitalist, in agricultural communities, is the man who
has seed corn to spare at the time of sowing. In China, where modern
expedients are criticised by the light of ancient principles, a very
rational distinction is drawn between loans for need and loans for profit.
Among the primitive progressive people who cultivated the wild wheat
of Babylonia, we may feel sure that the primitive instincts of hospitality
never sank so low, as for one man to ask another to give him back, with
increase, the corn borrowed and eaten in a day of need. But the case is
quite different as regards corn to be used, not for food, but for seed, cap-
able of bringing forth loo-fold. At such a time, to lend a measure of corn
is to give up the near and certain prospect of its natural increase, and the
owner, without churlishness, may stipulate for a share in the increment of
value contributed by earth and heaven. If one man gives the seed and
another the labour, and the sun and river grant an abundant harvest, a
third part of the whole crop might not unnaturally seem a fair share for each
of the partners in the adventure, while in three years the heaven sent resi-
due would pay off the loan. Some such primitive calculation must have
been made in the first instance, to account for the selection of three years
as the term within which all lawful interest had to be paid off, and the
corresponding usage must have been found practically equitable or it could
never have become so deeply rooted and long enduring.

In Chaldsea, where trade sprang up as early and throve as exuberantly
as agriculture, the rate of interest for the use of money was nearly or quite
as high ; because money or valuables employed in trade bred money and
valuables as fast as seed bred ears of corn. But in archaic States, where

CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM. 195

forethought does not go much beyond the coming harvest, loans for agri-
cultural profit are mostly for short terms, for months rather than years, while
loans for necessity are given free of interest, or converted into gifts by rela-
tives or fellow-clansmen. Hence a nominally high rate of interest may be
customary and legal, as in China, without the poorer classes falling abjectly
into the power of money-lenders. The notion of interest to be paid in
perpetuity, by one generation after another, is distinctly modern, and in-
volves inconsistencies of which primitive common sense was less tolerant
than we are. The indefinite growth of indebtedness, by the accumulation
of simple and compound interest, was perhaps hardly a danger in ancient
Egypt; and the importance attached to the legislation of Bocchoris may
have been owing to the recent development of abuses introduced since the
influx of foreign kings and traders.

The device by which the law against the accumulation of interest was
evaded, during the later years of Egyptian history, is almost certainly a
late, and probably not a native, invention. Instead of stating the amount
of the debt and the interest to be paid, deeds were drawn up stating that
such a sum was to be repaid at a given date, that sum including both the
principal and the legal interest, with a penalty, usually equal to the original
debt in full, for breach of contract.1 Such loans are described as capital
including the increase, and by them a peasant, borrowing three measures of
corn and promising to return four at the end of the year, or forfeit six if he
failed to do so, — would find his debt doubled at the end of one year
instead of three. The assistance of the official notaries and the six witnesses
required for the smallest transactions was, however, a security against the
original loan being misrepresented ; and if the exorbitant penalty was not
exacted because of the debtor's indigence, a fresh deed was needed to pro-
long the liability, so that, in spite of evasions, the law probably limited the
usurer's profit, to what he could squeeze out of his victim, in the compara-
tively short term between one and three years.

This evasion was probably suggested by another feature of Egyptian
contracts. It was usual in such documents to stipulate for the payment of
a heavy fine, in addition to the principal and interest, if these were not
paid when due. In Babylonia, the corresponding penalty, if mentioned
at all, was stated to be payable either to the king or to the god of some
temple, and latterly in Egypt the penalty to the king was the rule, which
gave the fisc an interest in enforcing contracts. The foreign rulers viewed
with dissatisfaction the custom which made the claims of the private
creditor take precedence of the fine, so that if the defaulting debtor was
able to pay his debt and nothing more, the State derived no benefit from
its intervention. In China the State is very seldom appealed to to enforce
the fulfilment of contracts or even the payment of debts ; credit is easily
obtained, and persons engaged in the humblest industries avail themselves
of this resource as readily as merchants of position. In any class a person
who fails to meet his engagements suffers the natural punishment of his
1 Les Obligations en droit Egyptien, p. 69.

1 96 O WNERSHIP IN EG YPT.

offence, in not being able to borrow or buy on credit again. Most prob-
ably this simple, self-acting penalty was found sufficient in the days of
Egypt's prosperous isolation. The bare stipulation for an exorbitant fine
was scarcely likely to be complied with, by those who were unable or
unwilling to meet their just liabilities ; and the appeal to the king, in it-
self an afterthought, followed almost necessarily, when contracts multiplied,
and were not always so mutually advantageous as to be fulfilled of course
without penalty.

It is noticeable that, while law or custom effectively defended the debtor
against oppression by his creditors, the right of the creditor to recover the
actual amount of his loan was not less fully recognised ; and the invocation
of the king, with a view to making him a party to the cause of just repay-
ment, is characteristic of the early trading race. As the " king's peace "
was invoked to enable warlike tribes to sink private feuds, and settle into
civilized society, these zealous traders, with little taste for fighting, invoked
the king's justice to hold private dishonesty in check, and in so doing he
was not conceived to abandon his proper role as protector of the poor ;
the non-payment of a loan was reprobated as dishonesty, because borrowers
were a solvent class.

In some Egyptian contracts, for instance those relating to the payments
connected with a marriage, the penalties were conceived as offering a real
alternative ; if the bargain was not carried out, such and such damages
were to be paid — and the attempt to provide in the original deed for the
contingency of its non-execution is probably ancient, as it is certainly
characteristic of the early disposition to leave individuals free to settle
their own affairs to the joint satisfaction of the parties, without State help
or regulation.

The use of this stipulation for a money fine helped to strengthen the
Egyptian tendency, already mentioned, to regard all obligations as par-
taking of the nature of a loan or debt, because the method of recovery
was the same in all. And the primitive Egyptian form of marriage settle-
ment became encumbered with a good many legal fictions, arising from this
source, the husband affecting to be in his wife's debt for moneys which he
really intended to convey to her as a gift.

Four classes of goods were recognised in Egyptian law : immovables,
such as land or houses, to which alone the antichretic form of mortgage
was usually applied ; movables, such as furniture, precious metals, cloth-
ing, gathered crops, etc. ; things that move themselves, i.e. animals and
slaves ; and abstract possessions, such as rights to liturgies, interests in
other person's debts and the like. Things moving themselves might be
alienated by a single act, and therefore in the comparatively rare cases of
fiduciary sales or mortgages of such property, a second deed was appended,
stipulating for their return on repayment. Dead "movables " had to be
given back in good condition (a stipulation enforced against pawnbrokers
in China), and the increase of live movables restored when the pledge was
redeemed, as in the case of land, by the form of resale.

CIVIL LAW AND CUSTOM. 197

Ordinary contracts were as simple as possible ; the lawful owner sells
outright for the price paid down in full, and reasonable evidence of con-
sent between the parties sufficed to secure lawful recognition for the
bargain. As in China, corn and silver were used as the chief medium of
exchange ; the formulas of sale always speak of silver, but rents, even of
town houses, were paid in corn down to a late period. Silver was sold by
weight, but that it was not used or regarded as money is proved by the
fact that the owner of a piece was more inclined to pledge than to change
it. The names of moneys mentioned in demotic deeds are nearly all of
Semitic origin, but pieces of metal perforated and strung like Chinese cash
were used to some extent. The commercial races of remote antiquity
dispensed with the use of current coin by the same means which cause its
use to be so much restricted in modern Europe. The proportion of actual
gold or silver, used by a wealthy Englishman, is small indeed in comparison
with the transactions he effects by means of paper credits, of one sort or
another ; and in ancient Egypt and Chaldsea, as in modern China, the
ready use of barter in small transactions and of credit in large ones,
enabled business to go on briskly without the help of gold or silver
coinage.

The value of the later Egyptian coins and of the weights and measures
in use will be referred to below in connection with the general diffusion of
standards derived from Babylonia.

CHAPTER VIII.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW.

§ i. DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIPS.

THE family relations of the ancient Egyptians are abundantly illustrated by
their inscriptions, and it is not supposed that the legislative reforms of
Bocchoris effected any change in the national customs regarding marriage
and inheritance. We are, however, indebted to him for the abundance of
written materials bearing on this subject, by the help of which we are not
only able to form some idea of the spirit of Egyptian family life, but also
to reconstruct in outline the legal status and proprietary rights of different
members of the family group, as recognised from the Thirty-second to the
Twelfth Dynasty, and most probably back to a still earlier date.

Reference has been made already to the ideal of a great and good
Egyptian as set forth in ancient epitaphs, but the domestic virtues are as
much insisted on as the liberal wisdom desiderated in a governor of men.
The subject of an inscription of the Fifth Dynasty calls upon his descend-
ants to bear witness for their ancestor that he was one " who lived in peace
and wrought righteousness, loving his father, loving his mother, giving
way to his companions; the joy of his brothers, the beloved of his servants,
no accuser or slanderer, a teller of the truth which is dear to God."1 In
an epitaph of the Hyksos period, the speaker, who boasts a family of sixty
children, says of himself: " I loved my father, I honoured my mother, my
brother and my sisters loved me." 2 The commonest formula, which con-
tinued in use as long as Egyptian civilization survived, was one describing
the deceased as " loving his father, reverencing his mother, and being
beloved by his brethren ; " and there can be no doubt that this phrase,
when first adopted, represented the maturest convictions of Egyptian
philosophers as to the sentiments necessary for the felicitous working of the
family relationships. It seems as if they assumed that fathers would
certainly be sufficiently reverenced if they were loved, and mothers loved
enough if they were honoured;3 and they recognised certain possible

1 Lepsius, Denkmaler, ii. p. 81.

2 Brugsch, Hist., i. p. 262.

3 A passage in the Babylonian Talmud may preserve the traditional comment of Chal-
dasan wisdom upon a similar formula : " It is open and known to Him who spoke and
the world was created, that the son honours his mother more than his father, because she
appeals to him with words ; therefore has the Holy one, Blessed be He, set the honour
of the father above the honour of the mother. But it was also open and known to Him
who spoke and the world was created, that the son fears his father more than his mother,
and therefore the Holy one, blessed be He, has set the fear of the mother above the
fear of the father." (Tractat Kidduschim, 22. Wiinsche's Tr., vol. ii. p. 92.)

198

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 199

sources of disagreement between brethren which made the subsistence of
fraternal affection as meritorious as it was desirable.1

Whatever weak points there may have been in the popular morality of the
Egyptians, one all important moralising agent was conspicuous by its pre-
sence through the millenniums of the national independence. They are
certainly the first of all the nations in the world to put on record the exist-
ence, and their appreciation of the existence, of love in marriage. From the
great officer and land-owner of the ancient monarchy, whose tomb records
his reverence for the lost wife " who was sweet as a palm tree in her love
to Ti," onwards through successive centuries and dynasties, there is no mis-
taking the accent of strong and delicate feeling which meets us in one
monumental record after another. Whether it is a wife, a parent, or a
child who is named, together with the subject of any funeral inscription,
the words " who loves him " follow as a matter of course, as inevitably as
the name of the mother who gave him birth. All the domestic relations
have received the same illuminating touch. The mere animal regard, born
of kinship and propinquity, has developed into tender, fully self-conscious
affection, and the moral sense of the community has come to recognise
these affections as so entirely natural that the want of them would be
blameworthy. Epitaphs may not have been more entirely veracious in
Egypt than elsewhere ; but in no other country, ancient or modern, do we
find so clear and full a description of the purely domestic virtues, as forming
the best and chief title of the departed, to the regard and remembrance of
posterity.

These affections are counted among the pleasures rather than the duties
of life, for the inscription on a woman's tomb 2 urges and warns the sur-
vivors to miss none of the joys of love and life, since the disembodied
dead sleep in darkness, and this is the worst of their grief; "they know
neither father nor mother ; they do not awake to behold their brethren ;
their heart yearns no longer after wife or child."3 Men may claim on their
tombstones the possession of virtues which they have not practised, but
they will hardly bewail the loss of pleasures which they have not enjoyed.
The association between the ideas of relationship and affection is so ancient
and intimate that in the Book of the Dead, Horus, or the deceased in the
character of Horus, more than once claims the affection of Osiris in the
familiar terms : " I am a son loved by my father ; " " the son of the god
who loves him ; " Horus has performed the funeral rites as a son beloved
of his father Osiris." 4

Mention has already been made of the importance attached in Egypt to
the two incidents of maternal ancestry and primogeniture, but it is only in

1 In the Twelfth Dynasty, "rival brothers "are mentioned as a class of disputants
whom only a wise judge can dismiss contented from his tribunal.

2 Maspero, Hist. (German tr.), p. 41. So in the song of the Harper (Journal As.,
1880, p. 400) the bitterness of death is for the day to come " when you must approach
the silence-loving land, though the heart of the son who loves you has not ceased to beat."

3 The latest version of this text is by G. Benedite, Memoires de la Miss. Arch. Fran-
fatse au Caire, 1893, P- 529-

4 Le Livre des Moris, tr. by Paul Pierret, Ixxiii. 3 ; cxlv. 19 ; cxlvi. 29.

200 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

regard to the transmission of property that the position of the Egyptian
mother seems to have been one of exceptional authority.1 Reverence
was certainly her due, and gratitude for the benefits her care bestowed upon
infancy and childhood. When the son is married and has a household of his
own, he is warned not to forget all that he owes to the mother, who suckled
him for three years and brought him his food every day when he was at
school.2 Similarly, when he has entered into his inheritance, when his hands
are strengthened and the grief for his father's death assuaged, he is warned in
the name of the great chief (Osiris) not to tell lies against — or to oppose —
his mother,3 an exhortation which is doubtless to be understood as refer-
ring to their respective shares in the family property. But the fact that
such exhortations were needed proves that the son and heir was not depen-
dent on his mother, or subject in any peculiar sense to her authority.
There are no indications of her admitted claims to respect being pressed
to anything like the extent, for instance, of the authority assigned to both
parents in China, where the wife is as subordinate as the mother is supreme.
The queen consort in Egypt took precedence of the queen mother, and the
special authority of the mother, if it ever existed, must have ceased in pre-
historic times.

The wife, on the other hand, at the beginning as at the close of Egyp-
tian history, appears to have occupied a position of substantial equality in
relation to her husband for which it would be as hard to find a parallel in
modern as in ancient history. In the tombs of the Ancient monarchy, hus-
band and wife are represented sitting side by side, the hand of one resting
caressingly on the other's shoulder, with sons and daughters standing round
them, offering flowers, sitting at their feet or embracing the father's knee or
staff. Sometimes the monuments represent the " superb " action of the
modern Bedawee, admired by Lady Duff Gordon in the streets of Cairo,
when man and wife walk side by side, the latter proudly erect and resting
her hand on her husband's shoulder. 4

As is well known, the size of the figures in these wall pictures indicates
their comparative rank and importance ; the king is larger than his subjects,
the master than his servants, the parents than their children : husband and
wife, on the other hand, are usually of the same size, which represents the
relation of equality existing between a great man and his first or only
wife of equal birth ; sometimes, however, the wife and sometimes the hus-
band5 is represented on a smaller scale, and in such cases we may generally
infer that the reduced size indicates inferior rank or station. If two wives
are represented, they appear no larger than the children.

As legislators and moralists are accustomed to insist chiefly upon the

1 It may be taken as a recognition of the importance attached to the relationship that,
in the treaty of Rameses with the Khita, it is said of fugitives : his house, his wife, his
children shall not be destroyed ; his mother shall not be slain. (Maspero, Enqufre judi-
ciaire, p. 79.)

2 Chabas, L? Egyptologie. Maxims of Ani, 37.

3 Maspero, Du genre epistolaire, p. 70.

4 Letters from Egypt, p. 78.

5 Lepsius, Denkmaler^ ii. 42. G. 89 b.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 201

importance of duties which are in danger of being neglected, we may argue,
from the scarcity of texts respecting the duties of husbands or wives, that
the Egyptians of both sexes were as a rule satisfied with the conduct of
their consorts. Ptah-hotep devotes some sentences to the relation, which
would be invaluable for our present purpose, if their meaning could be
determined with confidence or precision. But the obscurity of the lan-
guage as yet baffles translators, and we can only build on the sense of the
few paragraphs respecting which they are substantially agreed.

The wise man, we gather, will watch over his house and love his wife un-
mixedly ; he will clothe and anoint her — phrases in which it is possible to
see a primitive recognition of the two payments to the wife secured in
demotic marriage contracts, namely, toilet money and pin money, the latter
of which seems to have been intended or used mainly to pay for oil or per-
fumes. He will not be rough with her ; kindness avails more than force.
He is counselled in emphatic terms to fulfil her desires — that is to say,
something — the translators are at a loss to know exactly what, but it is
paraphrased in the original as " her breath, her eyes, her looks " — is to be
given her, that she may rest contented in her house. For the husband to
repulse his wife is the abyss : his arms and his love should be open to her.
There is the less doubt about the rendering of the latter clause as the same
idea reappears almost verbatim, in the comparatively intelligible Maxims
of Scribe Ani : " Open thy arms for her, call her to thy arms, show her thy
love." The general sense of the whole passage seems to be in favour of
just that very kind of domestic, not to say uxorious felicity which we have
reason otherwise to regard as characteristic of the Egyptians ; to love his
wife and her children, and to enjoy their society and their caresses, was re-
garded as a counsel of wisdom, not a concession to the weakness of the
flesh.

In a subsequent passage the subject is recurred to. Taking a wife, we
are given to understand, should be a joyful business, but that depends
upon the wife's goodwill, which is to be ensured by love and kindness.
M. Virey's version1 of this difficult text has the great merit of giving the
various renderings of other scholars who have attempted it, together with a
word for word translation of the most unmanageable clauses, upon which
the unlearned reader can base his own conjectures. This second passage
concerning wives goes on, according to M. Virey himself: " Elle sera
attachee doublement si la chaine lui est douce," but the mol-a-mot is :
" Etant elle dans 1'attache doublement, douce a elle le lien ;" while Brugsch
in the same place uses the words "ist sie verlobt," — " if she is betrothed."
It is just possible that we have here an allusion to the two stages in a
marriage (the accepting and the establishing as wife) of which we hear so
much in later documents, and that the sage recommends the completion of
a marriage settlement, as tending to ensure the constancy and attachment
of a wife. .

1 BMiothique de V Ecole des hautes Etudes du Louvre, yoth Fascicule, 1887, and
Records of the Past, N.S., ii. I ff.

202 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

A pretty hint as to the relations existing between the spouses in most
households is given incidentally in the Ramessid collection of maxims
already quoted. Every way of life has its natural preoccupations: — "a
wife talks of her husband and a man of his trade."1 If anything, the
Egyptian Solomon seems to suppose that the husband's temptation will be
to meddle too much in household affairs : " Be not rough with thy wife
when she keeps good order. Say not : Where is that ? bring me this !
For she hath put everything in its proper place . . . put thy hand
gladly in hers. There are many who know not how they bring unhappiness
home."2 The same author gives a warning against strange women, and on
the whole the moralists seem to have thought it more necessary to exhort
men to avoid their neighbours' wives than to warn them not to ill-treat their
own. In a demotic book of sentences, which in many cases reproduces
the sayings of the ancients, we find the precept : " Ill-use not thy wife ; she
has transgressed, let her depart with her property,"3 — as if the idea of ill-
usage apart from transgression did not present itself.

The only indication of marital or masculine superiority, which can be ex-
tracted from these texts, lies in the fact that nothing at all is said about the
duties of the wife. As it is taken for granted that the subject people will
be good and happy if the king and his officers do their duty, so it seems
to be assumed that the happiness of the family will be secured if the hus-
band and father does his part ; and though this is rather a paradoxical way
of proving his supremacy, the argument is fair from the Egyptian point of
view. So far as there was a difference between the consorts, the husband
was thought of as depending on the wife for his pleasures, and the wife as
depending on the husband for her virtues ; but the only prerogative claimed
for the man in the family, as for the ruler in the State, was a somewhat
larger share of moral responsibility.

The ruler, it was felt, might be tempted to spend for his own pleasures
or glorification the food needed for his people's maintenance, and the
father of the family might be tempted to seek his pleasures outside the
domestic circle. The moralists wisely addressed themselves to the most
apparent dangers, and did not go on to imagine that the mass of the people
would be idle, or the generality of wives unfaithful or unloving, when kings
and husbands were liberal and loyal. But as all Egyptian moral precepts
emanated from men of letters, holding high office in the State, that is from
the class whose duties are thus seriously set forth, we must conclude that
the tendencies reprobated were distinctly less marked in Egypt, than in
those countries where they have been tolerated, or regarded as inseparable
from the qualities otherwise most highly esteemed.

In view of the very large proprietary powers exercised by Egyptian wives
and mothers, it was so evidently necessary for the consorts to be habitually
of one mind that the expediency of marriages of inclination was rendered
obvious, while the part assigned to the firstborn in the domestic economy

1 Maxims of Ani, 30. 2 7&, 54.

3 Cotirs de droit Egyptien, p. 29.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 203

of the country furnished special arguments in favour of early marriages, in
addition to the ordinary desire for posterity. The father is advised not to
make his son take a wife except after his own heart ; and the first of Ani's
maxims says : " Take to thyself a wife in youth, thy son will do likewise for
thee ; " that is to say, you and he will both have sons born in your prime ;
and the father is considered to have most to gain by this result, as he makes
sure of a grandson as well as a son.

The relation between the three primary members of the Egyptian family
group is so close that it is scarcely possible to consider them except to-
gether. The typical Egyptian triad consists of father, mother, and son ;
the gods themselves are arranged in such groups and the tutelary deities of
different towns or nomes are usually more or less closely associated with
the two other personages who go to make up the divine family. 1 It seems
as if the rapid development of family affection, within the natural household,
had caused the proprietary rights commonly extended in primitive com-
munities to a whole clan, to be made over unimpaired to the family group.
Parents and children (the eldest child representing all the rest) were con-
ceived, so to speak, as forming a corporation, and to this — the natural as
distinct from the conventional family — the property of the family was con-
sidered to belong.

The earliest legal documents yet translated are those found by Mr.
Petrie in the Twelfth Dynasty town of Kahun. They profess to be " set-
tlements of property, otherwise wills, drawn up respectively in favour of
a brother, a wife and a son of the testators. In the first an architect,
Ankh-ren, says : " All my property in the garden and in the town (?)2 shall
belong to my brother the sub-priest of Sepdu . . . called Uah. All
my friends (?) belong to this my brother." A copy of this was deposited
in the hall of the second reporter of the king in the year 44 (? of Amenem-
hat III.). The legatee Sepdu, after inheriting under this will, settled on
his wife all the property he had derived from his brother, Ankh-ren : " She
may give it to any whom she pleases of her children whom she shall (?)
bear to me. I give to her the servants, three persons, which my brother,
. . . Sekhemren gave to me. She may give it to any of her children
she may wish." He also reserves absolutely to his wife his tomb and a
house Sekhemren had built for him.

In general, the motive for reserving such a right of appointment to the
wife would be, not so much to increase her liberty of enjoyment, as to leave
her free to provide, at discretion, for the children as they come of age to
want their share, in the way the father would have done. It is, however,
possible in this particular case that the father wished for some reason to
exclude his eldest son from the position naturally due to him ; for there is
a postscript to the will to say that a lieutenant Sibu is to have the training
of any son that may be left, instead of his son. If not the result of family

1 Wiedemann, Geschichte, p. 49.

2 This is the common phrase in Babylonian deeds : in later Egyptian ones, " all my
property, present and to come," is more frequently mentioned.

204 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

dissensions, the clause will point to the existence of the custom of foster-
age.

Another of the Kahun documents, probably belonging either to the
reign of Usurtasen I. or Amenemhat III., shows that both wills and mar-
riage settlements, in the interest of wives and children, were in use ; but we
gather that the settlement by itself would be sufficient when there was only
one family of children to be provided for. In this case the testator had
been twice married. He gives his office to his son, named like himself,
Meri-antef, saying : " I am growing old now that I have become aged in it.
Let him enter upon it immediately (?). Verily my settlement which I
made to his mother remains to her from front to back. Verily my house
which is in the ' desert of the house ' and on which my hand remains, it
is for my children which Sit-ama . . . has borne me, namely . . .
Sebek . . . Nebt H . . . ; together with all that it contains."
The motive of the will is obviously to induce Meri-antef, in consideration
of immediate entry on his father's office, not to raise any difficulty against
the provision for Sit-ama's children. Indeed, the proposal to leave to her
the house on which " his hand still remains," seems to imply that the rest
is ceded already.1

§ 2. PROPRIETARY PARTNERSHIP OF WIVES.

The earliest marriage contracts which have reached us are the most
meagre, and contain only a general undertaking to do all that belongs to a
lawful marriage, le faire a toi mart, as M. Revillout renders it. Deeds
prior to Darius I., i.e. between him and Bocchoris, are not numerous, and
are in all ways less explicit than those under the Lagidae ; for instance, " I
have established thee for wife ; to thee belong all things depending on my
being thy husband from this day forth." 2 Common law or custom fixed no
doubt exactly the position of an " established wife," and it is our misfor-
tune that the first written deeds treat this as too well known to need speci-
fying. There seems, however, little room for doubt that the equal, lawful
wife, she whose proper title is " lady of the house,"3 was also joint ruler
and mistress of the family heritage. In a love song translated by M.
Maspero 4 we find this co-proprietorship of the wife treated incidentally as
the sign or symbol of complete union : " O mon bel ami, mon desir c'est
(que je devienne maitresse de) tes biens en qualite d'epouse, c'est que, ton
bras pose sur mon bras, tu te promenes a ton gre', (car alors) je dirai a
mon coeur qui est dans ton sein (mes) supplications." 5 The whole tone

1 Kahun, Gurob, and Hawara, W. M. Flinders Petrie, pp. 45? 6.

2 La Condition juridiqne de lafemme dans Vancienne Egypte, by G. Paturet, p. 47.

3 Rev. Egyptologique, i. p. 132.

4 Journal Asialiquc, 1883, p. 35 : If he does not come to her, she is as one who is in
the grave. Cf. ante, p. 199.

5 Arab poetry contains nothing more impassioned than a love charm quoted by M.
Revillout in his version of the "Tale of Setna " (p. 37, n.). The gods are invoked
against So-and-so, daughter of Such-an-one, that she may not eat or drink or anoint
herself, or sit in the shadow of her home, till she goes to him wherever he may be. " Her
heart forgetting its rest and her time passing without her knowing where she is, till she

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 205

of the poem is too impassioned to let it be supposed that the lady desires
her lover's property for its own sake ; only, such ownership being of the
essence of wifehood, she mentions it as synonymous with the marriage for
which she sighs.

All written marriage contracts refer to the " taking " and the " establish-
ing " as wife, as two distinct steps, and in some the second stage, which
seems to have conveyed the proprietary rights, was not taken till after the
birth of children. There were thus apparently de facto wives, not neces-
sarily holding the rank of "lady of the house," but capable of being pro-
moted to it by a retrospective contract.

It is possible that, as in ancient Irish and Welsh law, marriages of
different degrees were recognised, and there seems an intimation of some-
thing of the kind in the different phrases used to describe the women-folk
of the workmen aggrieved by Paneba, in the time of Seti II.1 The culprit
is accused of violating " the wife of the workman K., the woman H. who
was with P., and the woman H. who was with . . . and was as a wife
to him."'2' We know by the demotic deeds that persons of quite humble
station entered into the orthodox partnership with an established wife, and
the retrospective contracts of establishment 3 were evidently as a rule
entered into by the husband for the benefit of a woman, who had been
"with him as a wife to him;" and relations of an even less binding
character than this were not ignored. The difference between the legiti-
mate marriage by establishment and other unions consisted in the former
being necessary when the object in view was to found a family or to con-
tinue one already existing, and the importance attached to descent on the
mother's side seems to have operated as a sufficient inducement to the
men of Egypt to enter into the customary contract, so as to secure the
status of their sons.

Why the act of marriage, like the purchase of land, was conceived as
consisting of two parts, is a matter of conjecture. M. Revillout suggests
that the taking to wife may have been a comparatively informal matter,
needing ratification at the end of a year if it is to carry serious proprietary
rights ; he quotes customs of Bretagne, Anjou, and elsewhere which make
the communaute de biens between the married pair only begin in its com-
pleteness when they have been married for a year and a day ; and he
rightly claims the old Scotch custom of handfasting, described by Sir
Walter Scott, as an instance of the same type of primitive usage.4 As
has been seen, Ptah-hotep seems to recognise two steps or links in the
marriage bond, of which one partakes to some extent of the character of
betrothal. Among the modern Kabyles,5 the first step towards marriage

sees him eye to eye, heart to heart, hand to hand, giving him all her being." Erman (p.
519) renders the same passage, " If my elder brother does not come." Does the elder
brother marry a sister and the elder sister a brother ?

1 Chabas and Birch, Plainte centre un malfaiteur, p. 181.

2 The phrase for a woman living with a workman is " one who clothes " her man.

3 Cours de Droit, i. p. 222.

4 Revue Egyptologique, i. p. IIO.

5 Hanoteau and Letourneaux, vol. ii. p. 213.

206 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

is an interview between the parents or guardians of the parties, which is
equivalent to a betrothal ; both parties are bound by it, and the marriage
gift must be paid afterwards and the person of the bride given up within a
term which, apparently, must not exceed one year. We can set no limit
to the date of Berber customs like this, which had become inveterate be-
fore the spread of Islam ; but the betrothal is clearly parallel to the
Egyptian " accepting " ; and the fact, that the bestowal of the marriage
gift belonged to the second stage of the transaction, harmonises with what
we see to have been the case in Egypt, as to the co-proprietorship of the
wife, which begins with the deed of establishment. Similar marriage cus-
toms lasted in parts of Asia Minor till long after the extension of the
Roman empire.1

The endowment of the wife by the husband with all his worldly goods
was intended in Egypt as a step to the admission of the children of the
marriage into the same partnership, and it is therefore very probable that,
in the first instance, the community of goods was not intended to take
effect till after the birth of the first child ; and thus the customary year of
provisional or informal marriage of the Berbers and Egyptians would con-
nect itself with the secret intercourse sanctioned under the same circum-
stances by the Spartans, the modern Albanians, and other tribes with a
rudimentary civilization. Even at the present day, among the Basques,
custom sanctions a good deal of midnight wooing ; betrothal is intended to
end in marriage, and the proprieties are satisfied so long as the ceremony
precedes the birth of the eldest child.

As society became settled, it was natural to substitute a fixed period,
like the Celtic year and day, for the variable interval preceding the birth of
an heir ; and there is direct evidence in favour of such a term having pre-
ceded the establishment of the normal proprietary partnership. The son
of a woman, who died before the end of the first year of a second marriage,
claimed to have his mother's dowry restored to him, the second husband's
family having taken possession of that, together with the rest of his pro-
perty. On the one hand, the woman had not become entitled to dispose
of her second husband's property, and on the other, he had not become
absolute owner of what she brought him. If there had been children from
the marriage, of course they would have inherited the property of both
parents, and, failing children, if the marriage had lasted longer, perhaps
the action of the husband's family would have been justified; but as it
was, the claim of the son by the first marriage was allowed.2

Even when there had been no betrothal and no intention of marriage,
Egyptian law or custom seems to have recognised the claim of any mother
of children to some kind of provision at their father's expense. By a

1 See post, Book III. ch. vii.

2 Revue Egyptologique, vol. i. p. 1 10. The husband declared himself to have received
two talents of copper as a dowry with the woman, and he engaged to marry her at the
end of the year or else to return the dowry and half as much again. In this case both
parties died before the term expired, but the existence of such a contract in writing is
conclusive proof that similar agreements were customary.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 207

curious deed of the Ptolemaic period,1 a certain Lothario cedes to a woman
a number of slaves ; and — in the same breath — recognises her as his law-
ful wife, and declares her free not to consider him as her husband. She
and her father are authorized, under penalties, to claim the discharge of
the payments promised, which are evidently regarded as an alternative for
a regular marriage, with retrospective endowment or establishment, like
that contained in another deed given by i\t. Revillout.2 The marriage
having been broken off, the lady, after the Egyptian fashion, accepts
damages for breach of contract instead of pressing for specific performance.

A byssus worker at the factory of Amon promises, to the wife he is
about to establish, one-third of all his acquisitions from thenceforward :
" my eldest son, thy eldest son, among the children born of thee pre-
viously and those thou shalt bear to me in future, shall be master of all
that I possess now or shall hereafter acquire, except the business of byssus
weaving of Amon " — which perhaps was more or less in the gift of the
priests. As no religious or moral superiority seems to have attached to
the established wife, it may have been usual for the lower classes only to
execute deeds of this kind, in the event of becoming possessed of property
beyond their ordinary earnings. Where such arrangements were not made
voluntarily, public opinion was always in favour of the woman, as is shown
by a Coptic story of S. Maccarius,3 who was wrongfully accused by a
young woman, and obliged to call her his wife and contribute to her
support, till she confessed that she had lied in calling him the father of
her children.4

In dealing with Egyptian marriage contracts, we have to depend almost
exclusively upon the publications of M. Revillout, and a general acknow-
ledgment of innumerable obligations to that indefatigable scholar may be
accepted instead of incessant references. The following contract of mar-
riage made in the thirty-third year of Ptolemy Philadelphus is fairly
representative of the family arrangements then usual. " Patma, son of
Pchelchons, whose mother is Tahet,says to the woman Ta-outem, daughter
of Relon, whose mother is Tanetem : I have accepted thee for wife, I
have given thee one argenteus, in shekels five, one argenteus in all for thy
woman's gift. I must give thee six oboli, their half is three, to-day six,
by the month three, by the double month six, thirty-six for a year : equal
to one argenteus and one fifth, in shekels six, one argenteus and one fifth
in all for thy toilet during a year. . . . Thy pin (or pocket) money
for one year is apart from thy toilet money, I must give it to thee each
year, and it is thy right to exact the payment of thy toilet money and thy
pin money which are to be placed to my account. I must give it to thee.

1 E. Revillout, Cours de droit Egyptien, vol. i. p. in.

2 Revue Egyptologique, vol. i. p. 113.

3 /£., p. 118.

4 Another example of the domestic discipline enforced by Egyptian village councils is
given by Wessely. ("Greek Contracts," Rev. Egyptologique, 1887, p- 67.) Four villagers
pledge themselves to the priest, scribe, and mayor of the town of Arsinoe, that a fellow
villager of theirs will become the friend of his wife, and will love her as noble women
ought to be loved !

208 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

Thy eldest son, my eldest son, shall be the heir of all my property present
and future. I will establish thee as wife. In case I should despise thee,
in case I should take another wife than thee, I will give thee twenty argen-
teus. . . . The whole of the property which is mine and which I shall
possess, is security of all the above words, until I have accomplished them.
The writings which the woman Tahet, daughter of Teos, my mother, has
made to me, concerning one half of the whole of the property which be-
longed to Pchelchons, son of Pana, my father, and the rest of the con-
tracts coming from her, and which are in my hand, belong to thee, as well
as the rights resulting from it. Son. daughter coming from me who shall
annoy thee on this subject, shall give thee twenty argenteus. . . ." l

This document, which is only one of a number, clearly illustrates the
proprietary independence of women. The mother or grandmother of the
parties are named, and the fact that the mother of the bridegroom had
half her husband's property to bequeath or assign, is amongst the evidence
which shows that the mother and children, in the natural course of things,
halved the inheritance between them on the father's death. But apart
from special contract or settlement, it is probable that neither of the
spouses inherited from the other.

M. Paturet, a pupil of M. Revillout, is disposed to distinguish two
types of marriage settlement, the former of which secured to the wife an
annual pension of specified amount, while the latter, and presumably the
more ancient, established a complete community of goods. The yearly
income or allowance in corn, oil, or silver assured to the wife was regarded
as interest on the money lent to the communaute by her, or in other words,
on the portion she brought to her husband on marriage. This interest
was due from the husband as long as the marriage lasted, and his property
was pledged as security for it, but the wife could claim the repayment of
the principal when she pleased. In one contract, by which the husband
gives his wife one-third of all his property, present and to come, he values
the movables which she brought with her and promises her the equivalent
in silver: " If thou stayest, thou stayest with them ; if thou goest away,
thou goest away with them," 2 and even in going away she is not to be put
on her oath, as to whether she did really bring what she is credited with,
nor as to whether it was worth the specified equivalent.

The distinction between toilet money and pocket money made in Theban
marriage contracts is not met with in those of Memphis, but the general
idea of a pension, or annual allowance to the wife, is common to both.
The amount of the pension varied, but not within very wide limits ; in
some cases it was fixed at 1,800 drachms, which is exactly equal to the
money allowance given to soldiers. In ancient Egypt, where the produce
of abundant harvests was not exported, but stored against a time of
scarcity, the price of the common necessaries of life varied little, and con-

1 Records of the Past, vol. x. p. 75.

2 G. Paturet, La Condition juridique de lafemme dans Vancienne Egypte^ p. 69. Rev.
Egyptologique^ i. p. 46.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 209

sequently it was easy to fix a rate of alimony corresponding to the real cost
of maintenance in different ranks. Under the Ptolemies, a rise of eighteen
yards was required to make "a good Nile," and in one comparatively late
contract the payment of an alimentary pension is made conditional on this
height being reached.1 Coptic contracts contain the same provision down
to a late period, in spite of its having been expressly prohibited by the
Emperor Gordian, A.D. 241.

M. Paturet 2 considers that the nuptial gift in Theban contracts was an
alternative to the sanch or credit, as for a loan, of Memphite contracts.
The Egyptian tendency to throw all obligations into the form of a loan
has already been noted, and it was the more convenient to treat the wife's
portion as possessing this character, in order that all the remaining pro-
perty of the husband might be treated as security for its repayment The
pension or allowance promised to the wife is not secured by mortgage,
though there is a fine for non-payment. But the general mortgage,, by
which the husband's whole property becomes security for trie wife's dowry,
touches literally all assets, debts due, as well as movables and immov-
ables. It is significant that in the earlier deeds the husband is not men-
tioned as such, only by name, as the son of such a father and mother, like
any stranger. The husband is bound for life by the contract pledging his
property, but the wife remained free to claim repayment at any time in
full, instead of the annual allowance.

If a husband wished to increase his wife's fortune after marriage, he
might acknowledge himself her debtor for a given sum, undertaking to
repay it at an interval which allowed the interest to have doubled its amount,
making all or a definite portion of his other property security for the debt.
In such a case, if he died before the expiry of the term,, his heirs would
have to pay the debt out of the estate, as they were compelled to do in
one instance, where the loan referred to was probably fictitious, and its
acknowledgment only a device for ceding the house pledged as security
for it. The courts, however, pronounced in favour of the widow, who
ceded the residue of the estate to the heirs-at-law when her own claim had
been satisfied out of it.3

The Egyptian term hoti, which describes the wife's security, is also used
for any property handed over to a creditor for a specified term, not merely
as security, but for use, such use serving to extinguish the debt. Wives
and widows often agree, in the case of particular obligations, not to claim
precedence regarding it in virtue of their hoti.^

The effect of the mortgage given on the husband's property as security
for the wife's settlement was very curious ; it made her consent necessary
to all her husband's acts, and even to further settlements for her own bene-
fit. In some cases, however, this consent seems to have been required to

1 E. Revillout, La Location : le$on professee a FEcole du Louvre, 1883.

2 La condition juridique de lafemme dans fancienne Egypte, p. 56.

3 Les obligations en droit Egyptien, pp. 176-9.

4 /£., p. 203.

P.C. P

210 O WNERSHIP IN EG YPT.

the original mortgage,1 and then the only possible explanation is that the
wife, as such, was co-proprietor with her husband, and therefore had to
be a party to any act disposing of the joint estate. The Greeks might
well exclaim that the wife was given authority over the husband, when it
was usual for the wife to endorse her husband's deeds, while he did not
endorse hers. But as we have seen, the married pair was usually on such
terms that the formality gave rise to no inconvenience. The wife's free-
dom to co-operate with the husband for any purpose which they agreed
in desiring was unrestrained, and the married couple consequently enjoyed
more liberty, in dealing with the family property, than the husband him-
self under laws starting from the tutelage of women.

The terms in which Diodorus speaks of the rights of wives were prob-
ably suggested by marriage contracts of a rather different type from those
already described. In these the husband literally endows his wife with
" all his worldly goods," stipulating only that she is to maintain him while
living, and to provide duly for his burial when dead.2 In a family of pasto-
phores, whose history is traced by M. Revillout,3 it was the regular thing
for the husband to make over his property to his wife, either all at once or
by degrees, while she in due course made it over to his son, and he again
to his own wife, with the like result. This was done equally in cases
when the contract expressly bars the intervention of sons and daughters.
A wife who was thus endowed, to the disadvantage of children by a former
marriage (one of whom signs the contract), having no children of her own,
made her husband's nephew her heir.4 Thus we find for a number of
generations the, apparently, unlimited ownership of the wife producing the
same effect as the strictest entail from father to son.

There were three principal forms of family arrangement in use; but
custom, backed by the double force of law and inclination, decided that
all three should be so administered as to secure, to the same extent, the
joint and several interests of all three elements in the family group. By
one arrangement the wife becomes on marriage, or after the expiry of the
first year of marriage, joint owner with her husband of all the family pro-
perty, with remainder to their eldest child in trust for the rest. By another,
the husband settled one-third of all his property on his wife, the remaining
two-thirds being probably considered as the property of the father and the
eldest child, while the latter again was regarded as trustee for the rest.
By the third alternative all the property was made over to the wife, and
during her life, she, rather than the eldest child, was regarded as trustee in
the children's interest.

If it were safe to infer the existence of a whole class of cases from a
single example, we might add a fourth alternative, corresponding to the
second of those mentioned above, only with the role of husband and wife
inverted. There is a very curious contract of the time of Darius L, in

1 Les obligations en droit Egypt ien, p. 82.

2 Etudes Egyptologiques, livr. xiii. pp. 230, 294.

3 ChrestQmathie Dcmotique, p. clvi. 4 /^., p. li.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 211

which the usual stipulations are reversed, the wife speaking of the man as
being established as her husband, acknowledging the receipt of a sum of
money as dowry, and undertaking that if she deserts or despises him, a
third part of all her goods, present and to come, shall be forfeited to him.1
This is one of the earliest deeds of the kind, and the odds are strong
against the survival of a singular, eccentric document. The existence of
the two forms of contract would be intelligible if we suppose the terms of
them to be conditional on the relative position of the spouses ; and this
particular deed would be quite in accordance with Basque and Malayali
analogies, if it represented the contract between an Egyptian heiress and
a man without property. The penalty for unfaithfulness is imposed alike
in the case of both parents, and for the same reason ; namely, to ensure
the children of the marriage against disinheritance through the misconduct
of the richer parent.

The third alternative, by which the husband transfers all his property on
marriage to his wife, is the most unaccountable and the most characteristic
of all. Such a custom could hardly have grown up out of pure uxorious-
ness. In the most archaic communities, like the ancient Nabatseans and
the modern Nairs, where property passes to the children through the
mother only, the wife does not enter into any such partnership with regard
to the inherited property of the husband, though it is customary for him to
contribute, out of his earnings, to the establishment and maintenance of
the household. The husband acquires during the marriage a certain
interest in his wife's property, but that of his own family descends, irre-
spective of his wish or appointment, to his sister's children. With the
development of family affection and habits of monogamy, this state of
things is felt to be unnatural and vexatious, and accordingly the Nairs in
the nineteenth century have resorted to the very same device as the ancient
Egyptians, to secure the father's property to his children ; that is to say,
the father himself gives away absolutely all that he possesses to his chil-
dren during his own life, if he wishes to make sure of their possessing it
after his death.2

The typical Egyptian marriage settlement, in which the husband declares
to the wife : " My eldest son, thy eldest son, shall be the heir of all my
property present and to come," was apparently a product of the modern
historic marriage of affection grafted (circ. 3000 B.C.) upon the ancient
prehistoric custom of transmitting property through women only. The
marriage contract bestowed upon the wife the proprietary rights which the
sister was held to possess by nature, and local usage only varied in the
comparative prominence given to the wife and to the eldest child in the
family partnership.

1 Coiirs de i/rrit, i. p. 285. Rev. Egypt., 1882, p. 270.

2 Malabar, by W. Logan, i. p. 154, and post, Bk. III., ch. x.

212 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

§ 3. PROPRIETARY RIGHTS OF CHILDREN.

The partnership of children in their parents' property during the life of
the latter is proved by innumerable deeds and expressions. Sometimes
the father is represented as contracting "for his sons," just as, after, or
even before the father's death, the eldest brother takes action on behalf of
the rest, or, as the phrase is, "stands up for them." Sometimes the exist-
ence of a similar state of things is evidenced incidentally : houses or lands
are described as belonging to such an one "for his children." A son of
Hermias, for instance, has one-sixth of a house and other property " for
his son ; " and his sister has one-sixth for her daughter. We read of " the
house of Pahor, son of Panofre, who owns it for Tachelon, his daughter," v
and elsewhere some one holds property for "his son, whose wife is So-and-
so."

It is possible that family property could originally only be disposed of
freely with the consent of all three members of the family group, and that
the father was therefore, in some way, dependent for his full legal compe-
tence upon the possession of a son and heir. In the Book of the Dead and
other solemn documents, it is spoken of as the function of the eldest son
to bear witness, to make answer or to plead for his father, as Horus for
Osiris against Set, before the tribunal of the gods. But this recognition of
the son's or the children's partnership does not necessarily imply the
abdication, by the father, of his present natural right to administer the
family estate. If he chooses to constitute himself a trustee for his chil-
dren, it is in order that the settlement intended by him for the future
security of the family property may begin to take effect at once.

Similarly, though young children may take part in legal transactions
initiated by their parents, the consent of the latter is frequently given — and
we must suppose, therefore, was required — to legal documents in which
even children of full age take part. The partnership, or communaute de
biens, between parents and children was thus a reality, neither generation
being actually sacrificed to the other. The father might, and under the
Ptolemies frequently did, assign his property to his children while still
alive, and the custom was old enough for a scribe of the Ramessids to
advise against it.2 He does not hint at anything so tragic as the fate of
Lear as likely to follow upon such conduct, but he thinks it wiser for the
householder to economise privately and let his descendants profit by the
treasure he is thus enabled to leave them, instead of giving up his power
and property to others before the time.

The Basque customs,3 to which reference has been made, show the
working of this partnership between two generations, continued in unbroken

1 N oil-veil e Chrestomathie Demoticjue, pap. 113 b.

2 Maxims of Ani, 18.

3 Described in a valuable monograph by M. Eugene Cordier, De V organisation de la
famille chezles Basqiies, 1869. Cf. also 1} organisation delafainille, F. de Play, 3rd ed.,
1884, containing the history in detail of typical Basque families.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 213

sequence from age to age, with singularly conservative results. " Los sen-
hors et dames juens," as the Coutume of Navarre calls them, are the
favourites of the law. The eldest child, son or daughter, is called the
heir, or heiress, and becomes entitled on marriage to an equal partnership
with the parents in the enjoyment and control of the family property.
By an admirable invention, heirs and heiresses are not allowed to inter-
marry ; the eldest daughter inheriting one farm must marry a younger son
from another, who takes her name and comes to live on her inheritance.
The eldest son and heir must similarly marry a younger daughter from
some other house ; the younger children of both sexes are entitled to a
marriage portion or dowry, though many of them live in celibacy rather
than burden the estate with too heavy charges on this account. It is in
this sense that, as Strabo says of the Cantabri, " the daughters are left
heirs and procure wives for their brothers."

The younger children with their families, if they marry, work as servants
on the family property, and have a right to maintenance out of it ; but as
the work of the community must have some one head, while there may be
two, or even three, co-seigneurs, the senior frequently abdicates as in
Egypt, leaving the administration of the property to the heir in the prime
of life. The eldest grandson or daughter also becomes entitled on
marriage to half the patrimony, but it is evident that the son, who
administers under the eyes of two generations, has the strongest reasons
for adhering to the Kantian rule, and treating his father as it is fitting that
all fathers should be treated, since in the near future he himself will become
dependent on the filial forbearance of his son.

If anything, the Basque custom restricts the rights of fathers more than
was the case in Egypt; and, since the modern custom can be shown to have
worked smoothly, and on the whole beneficially, there is no difficulty in
believing in the possibility of analogous usages in Egypt, where family affec-
tion was more articulate and perhaps stronger ; since life was easier, and
the chances therefore less of abuses not legally impossible. This system
of family law has certainly resulted in keeping family properties together,
and families themselves alive, for a longer term than has become general
under any other regime. For one thing the prohibition of marriages be-
tween sole heirs and heiresses prevents the cultivation of childlessness,
which results in the dying out of old and rich families ; and, as com-
pared with ordinary primogeniture, the acceptance of daughters as qualified
to keep up the family, doubles its chances of duration. A family in
Andorre, which is said to have kept its name and its property without in-
crease or diminution for between 700 and 800 years, twice depended for
its maintenance on the life of a sole heiress. Records of this length are by
no means exceptional, and families 400 years old are still quite common,
though unfortunately the national custom is in some danger of becoming
extinct, through inconsiderate applications of the Code Napoleon.

We do not know of anything in Egypt, answering to the rule against
marriages between eldest children or the heirs and heiresses of different

2i4 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

families, which indeed would have little meaning except in small com-
munities of peasant proprietors. It is, however, possible that claims to
inherit from the father of a mother were conditional on the mother's being
an eldest child or heiress ; we have seen that children did not inherit from
two families at once, and if the mother's inheritance was better worth
claiming by the eldest son than the father's, the relation between the
parents must have been rather like that between the Basque primee or
heiress and the nore or dowered husband, who was a cadet of another
family. There are varieties of usage in the different Basque provinces,
though the one we have described is the most general and typical form ;
and it is of course possible that, in different parts of Egypt, the national
usage may have been subject to variation.

It is not clear, for instance, whether the eldest daughter always inherited,
or inherited from her mother only, or inherited from both parents only if
there were no sons ; and it certainly seems probable that the hereditary
claims of women belonging to royal or noble families, were recognised as
of peculiar strength. A curious fragment of the Eighteenth Dynasty favours
the third of these alternatives, as it records the petition of a private
individual to be put in possession of the tomb of his "father,'' one Qa'an,
in virtue, the petitioner urges, " of my mother, his daughter by birth, and
he left no male offspring." In a sepulchral inscription of the Twelfth
Dynasty, " his wife beloved and his eldest granddaughter," by name, are
mentioned before his son, by the person commemorated : and these in-
scriptions, together with those previously quoted in illustration of the
importance of descent in the female line, seem to point to regular, but not
exclusive, inheritance of property by women, to an extent that would be
exactly explained if we suppose some form of the Basque rule, of primo-
geniture without distinction of sex, to have prevailed in Egypt.

The prevalence of such a rule is not a mere hypothesis. In the reign
of Darius Codomanus there were two brothers who left families, the mem-
bers of which desired to effect certain exchanges of property, and in the
necessary deeds, the family of the younger son is represented by his eldest
daughter, who acts for her younger brothers and sisters as the eldest
brother does for the younger children of the other branch.1 And in a
variety of other private deeds we find a daughter acting, apparently as sole
heiress, and really as kurios — as head of the family, entitled to represent
and speak in the name of the rest. It is noticeable that the two deeds,
which suggest the closest parallel to Basque usage, belong to the Persian
period, when native custom was less confused and corrupted than under
the later Ptolemies.

If the father did 'not divide the property during his own life, the eldest
son took his place and made the division on his death ; but he was bound
to respect the customary rights of his juniors, and if they were dissatisfied,
he could be put upon oath, which was considered to be equivalent to com-
pelling him to confess the truth, as to the verbal instructions given by his
1 Cours de droif, p. 193. Condition juridique de lafemme, p. 29.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 215

father. If the elder son chose to take one of the gods to witness, that his
father or mother had given him some part of the property, absolutely for
his separate use, his oath was accepted as conclusive. Even during the
father's life, the eldest son might act on behalf of his brothers and sisters
in what regards the family property ; though neither then nor afterwards
had he any personal control over them. Persons treating with an elder
brother for the sale of land say " thy land," even when it is qualified im-
mediately afterwards, as in the following : " Such are the neighbours of
thy plot of ten arurae, which is between thee and thy brothers, Nechth-
month, son of Hor, Petosor, son of Hor, Tave, daughter of Hor, whose
mother is Chachperi, thy brothers, to complete the four, a quarter to each
of you." All the children have an equal share, and if one of the brothers
or sisters dies, leaving issue before the partition, his or her part is given to
the eldest child of the second generation as representing the rest. The
eldest son, who acquires the above ten arurae, proposes that the cost of
his father's funeral shall also be divided into four parts and shared equally
by the sister and the three brothers ; and that the silver, brass, and other
movables shall be divided in like manner. The juniors in their turn
urge, in another document, that they should draw lots for the four portions
when divided, and that Osoroer, the eldest, is not to take the lion's share
of the liturgies.1

Egyptian law, like Chinese, considered all sons as legitimate,2 and all
were entitled to share in the father's property ; but the mother's name is
almost always mentioned as well as the father's, and, of course, the bene-
fits secured to the children, by their mother's marriage contract, were
confined to the offspring of that union. The father might bind his children
as co-guarantors for a debt for which the family property was rendered
liable ; 3 but the power of the kurios, or neb, to use the Egyptian word,
did not enable him to sacrifice the interests of those whom he represented.
What the Irish laws call a " bad contract," i.e. one injurious to either
party, might be repudiated when those who had signed as minors were of
age to judge for themselves. But when a father voluntarily shared his
property among his children, they and their descendants might be bound,
under a penalty, not to question the division, after a lapse of time during
which they availed themselves of it.4 The conspicuous share of the neb in
all legal proceedings, notwithstanding the strict limitation of his personal
interest in the transactions he conducts, may have been originally due to
the convenience of considering one person as the mouthpiece of many,
when all legal business was transacted verbally and, moreover, in a form
which allowed one person only to speak.5

Most of the points which are familiar in later systems of family law had
arisen and been decided in Egypt, probably with less friction than any-
where else, as the real difficulties arising out of joint ownership can best

1 Cours de droit, i. 189, 90. 2 /£., 169.

3 /<*., 1 80. * /£., 185.

5 Les obligations en droit £gyptien compare aux autres droits de VAntiquitt, p. 19.

2 1 6 O WNERSHIP IN EG YPT.

be solved where such ownership is deeply rooted in positive custom, so
that the persons concerned adopt, almost by instinct, the course which is
really most in harmony with the broad general principles in force. Thus
the eldest son is generally spoken of as heir to the goods of his father,
present and to come ; but the difficulty of bringing acquets into settlement,
of securing the parents' gains or earnings to the children, without restrict-
ing their reasonable liberty to employ their gains reproductively, has taxed
the ingenuity of Continental lawyers, without any means being found to
enforce, by law, the moderation in freedom secured by custom in Egypt.

As an illustration of the ease with which apparently complicated
arrangements were carried out, the case may be quoted of two brothers,
joint owners of a field, which is let to the creditor of one (the junior), as
security or equivalent for a debt. The elder brother, who speaks of " my
field/' concurs in the act; but the joint ownership necessitates two deeds,
the younger brother pledging his interest, and the elder letting his own
interest, which is not pledged. The elder undertakes to pay the third of
the produce which is due to the scribes of the sanctuary of Amon, and
further takes as rent of his share one-sixth of the remaining produce ; the
joint owners undertake to pay three-fourths of any further dues that may
be levied, as occasional taxes or royal dues, leaving the creditor to pay
the other fourth ; but this item clearly does not cover anything so con-
siderable as land tax, so that the brothers were probably occupiers of
temple land, i.e. lands formerly granted by the king, in the restricted sense
which conveyed, not the absolute right of private property, but the king's
right to levy land tax. The elder brother undertakes to bear any charges
not foreseen or arising from error, and his action throughout is that of
an indulgent father, using his own property and credit to facilitate the
business arrangements of a son.1

The division of property among the children of a family is, of course,
answerable for the curious traffic in fractional shares of different kinds of
property. It is common, for instance, for one-third or one-sixth of a
house or field to be sold to the person owning the other fractions. In
one case the party to a contract speaks of " the half of my sixth of three
fields," and another deed records the sale of one-seventh of five-sixths
plus one-forty-secondth of the property in question.2 Evidently it was
not from any inaptitude for the subtleties of trade that the Egyptians
failed to compete with Babylonia and Phoenicia in the exchanges of the
Old World.

Where there were two families of children, the apportionment of their
respective rights was always a somewhat complicated affair, even when
conducted amicably. In one case, a brother and sister, of the same
mother but different fathers, agree to divide their mother's interest in both
properties, the brother ceding to the sister the whole of what came from
her father, no doubt in view of his own inheritance of what his mother had

1 Les obligations en droit Egypiien, p. 122.

2 No^^velle Chresto mat hie Demotique, p. 127.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 217

from her second husband, his father. In another case an eldest son has
to divide between himself, his brother, and his sister, the inheritance of
their common father, the paternal grandfather and the maternal grand-
mother. The eldest son took an extra one-twelfth for himself, as was
not unusual, nor unreasonable, as the executorship must always have been
a somewhat burdensome task, and the mother divided her own property
in the same proportion by deed.1

Sometimes the existence of a second family gave rise to litigation : the
daughter of one Seesis, deceased, complains of the woman " who has be-
come her father's wife," and with her children has usurped all his property.
The daughter claimed to have the property divided, and her rights were
admitted. She and her brother were to share such goods of the father as
had not been formally alienated by him. They made oath that nothing
had been so alienated, except one house, sold to So-and-So ; incidentally
it appears that the purchaser had not got regular deeds, so that the
children's oath was necessary to secure his lawful possession, as well as to
oust the stepmother, who apparently had not been established and endowed
at all.2

The proprietary rights of wives and children were, no doubt, one of the
strongest influences at work, in making monogamy the rule in Egypt.
Though there was no civil or religious law against polygamy, and even the
children of slaves were accounted legitimate, the wife and children of a
first marriage were an almost insuperable obstacle in the way of a second.
By a common clause in marriage contracts, the husband was bound, in the
case of his " despising " his wife, or taking another than her, to pay her a
sum of money and let her return to her friends.3 These clauses served in
lieu of a divorce law, which does not seem to have been known in ancient
Egypt ; but even supposing the consorts to part by mutual consent, the
rights of their children would remain unimpared. If the husband rendered
himself liable for the stipulated damages to his wife, and had also already
endowed her eldest son with all his property, present and to come, he
would obviously be unable to make any provision for the second wife or
her children, except with the consent of the eldest son of the first wife.
Under these circumstances naturally plural marriages were rare, though
Egyptian children probably did not object to a second marriage after their
mother's death, and in case of more or less pronounced witchcraft, the
father might be tempted to sacrifice the interests of the first family, as
improperly as in the tale of Setna.

This demotic romance may indeed serve, as well as marriage contracts
of the same period, to illustrate the working of the Egyptian marriage law.
The hero of the story, like William of Deloraine, had rashly meddled with

1 Revue £gyptologiquet i. 125, 127. 2 /£., iv. 140.

3 Both the law of Islam and the Talmud contemplate the insertion of a corresponding
clause in marriage contracts, and in modern Turkey such a provision is taken for granted,
even if not expressly mentioned. (The Women of Tiwkey, p. 442, Miss Garnett.) In
both cases the custom is probably of pre-Semitic origin, as is the pledging of the hus-
band's property as security for the wife's dues.

2 1 8 O WNERSHIP IN EG YPT.

a mighty book of magic ; he stole it, read it, taught its charms to his wife,
copied it, and finally dissolved the roll itself in water and drank the same,
so that "he knew all that it contained." The god Thoth thereupon com-
plained to Ra that all his wisdom had been stolen, and, apparently by way
of judgment for the theft, a succession of calamities began to befall the
possessor of the stolen wisdom. He falls into the toils of an enchantress,
who appears as the daughter of the priest of Bast ; he is received by her
in a magnificent house, with ornaments of malachite and lapis lazuli,
couches draped with byssus, sideboards ranged with cups of gold filled
with wine, and whatever else may be imagined to captivate the senses. She
then exacts from her lover a contract ceding to her all his property of every
sort, to which the bewitched Setna agrees ; she then demands that his
children shall sign their names at the foot of the contract, in order that
they may not make any quarrel with her children about the property.1
This condition also is accepted, and as in dreams and fairy tales, the
children forthwith appear when wished for, and sign the contract. But
the enchantress is not yet satisfied, and she demands that the children
shall be put to death, in order that they may not complain of being dis-
inherited.

We need not follow the story further, but it shows clearly, that while
marriage contracts often involved a cession of property, by the husband to
the wife, children already born had a legal right to inherit their parents'
property; and that a renunciation of this right, extorted from their igno-
rance or weakness, would be condemned by public opinion and perhaps
invalidated by law. The consent of the children to their father's marriage,
which we find demanded in this tale, and formally accorded in many deeds,
was also required under certain circumstances among the Basques. Thus
by the Coutumier of Beam, a widowed gendre, that is to say, a younger
son, who had married an heiress, was allowed to bring a new wife to the
house of the first, with, but not without,, the consent of her children. And
though such an extension of the filial potestas may seem eccentric now, it
was necessary, if the children of the first marriage were to retain the rights
solemnly secured to them by their mother's marriage contract.

It is noteworthy, that in Egypt, where so much importance was attached
to the domestic affections, all domestic relations should have been so
closely interwoven with proprietary considerations. Family affection
throve notwithstanding, and it is even possible that it throve the better for
the all-embracing and deeply rooted customary code, which secured, to all
members of the family group, a substantially equal share in the necessaries
and amenities of life accessible to it. The antagonism between love and
money, which is now a commonplace in domestic romance, was probably
unknown in Egypt, where it was the universal rule for property to change
hands, on occasion of the agreement of a man and woman to play the part
of husband and wife, as well as in China, where property is transmitted
almost entirely apart from marriage. There was no marriage without
1 Roman de Setna, tr. E. Revillout. Cf. Cours de droit Egyptien, i. 177.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 219

money, or money's worth ; but to marry for money, in the modern sense,
was impossible when individual ownership was abolished by the act itself
of marriage.

The filial relation could be established by contract on due consideration
given. There is a deed of adoption, dating from the reign of Amasis, in
which a young man, who gives the names of his real father and mother,
declares himself to have received from a certain choachyte of Haredj the
money of sonship, or the price for doing the part of a son towards him.
" I am thy son," he says, "and the children whom I shall beget, all that I
possess, and all that I shall acquire (are thine). . . . Any one who
comes to thee, to take me away from thee, saying, He is not thy son, who-
soever it be, father, mother, brother, sister, lord, lady, even the high court
of justice or I myself, such an one shall give thee silver and corn, what-
soever thy heart shall please. And I shall still be thy son and my children
for evermore." l This deed is interesting, not only as an example of
adoption, but also as showing that the normal partnership between father
and son was entirely reciprocal, the father having the same claim on the
son's property as the son on his.

' We do not meet with any direct confirmation of Herodotus' curious
statement,2 that it was the duty of daughters to maintain their aged parents,
while sons only contributed to their support if they pleased. But to a
certain extent his observation may have been well founded, for whenever
a son was provided for in the calling of his wife's father, his claim upon his
own parents might be supposed to end, as by a kind Q{ forts familiation ',
while the father's means of living might be bequeathed, by a similar arrange-
ment, to his daughter's husband. In any case, the daughters were provided
for by their parents, and if we attach any importance to Herodotus'
authority on this matter, we must regard him as bearing witness to the fact
of the proprietary independence of women. The obligation to support
their parents clearly implies the possession of means to do so ; and indeed,
if the daughters whom Herodotus may have found discharging this obliga-
tion had not done so out of their own private resources, he would have
chronicled a still more amusing peculiarity ; that in Egypt men were com-
pelled to support their wives' parents, instead of, as elsewhere, their own.

It is, however, very likely that it was the custom in Egypt for daughters
to support their widowed mothers, or rather for such mothers to live with
their daughters rather than their sons. The fact that a married son had
ipso facto shared his possessions with his own wife and son, necessarily
limited his power of providing for the former generation as well. By
Egyptian custom, mothers and daughters were normally as well provided
for as sons and fathers, and the result was to leave parents and children
free to follow their own inclinations. But, by inclination, the tie between
mother and daughter was peculiarly close and strong. In a demotic
address or exhortation from a mother to a son, the general sense of which
is disputed, there is one quite intelligible clause : " My death is at hand,
1 P.S.B.A., May 1887, p. 168. 2 II. 35.

220 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

let me rejoin my mother" l And throughout the texts, though the relations
between fathers and daughters and between mothers and sons are by no
means ignored, that between fathers and sons and mothers and daughters
is certainly more frequently mentioned, as if it possessed the greatest
sanctity and importance.

The system of family law which prevailed without abuse or inconveni-
ence for unknown ages, in the Egypt of the Egyptians, was found prolific
of both as soon as it was adopted by foreigners, without the same instinct
for conservative moderation. In ancient Egypt the gift by the husband
to the wife of all his worldly wealth represented only a legal consecration
of the best form of domestic custom, according to which the wealth of
each family forms a common fund, administered for the joint equal
advantage of all its members, the spending department being practically
abandoned to the housewife. But the self-same usage which in a healthy
state of society, with a sound customary morality, serves to produce this
result, may in the hands of profligates of both sexes have an entirely oppo-
site effect, as the above quoted tale of Setna shows. The Greeks were
easily captivated by the charms of the Egyptian women, but could probably
only obtain access to those of laxer patriotism and morality, and even these
were only to be won by marriage contracts of the native type; and such a
bargain, viewed from the European adventurer's side, was that of a spend-
thrift, ruining himself by an intrigue with " a native woman." An Egyptian
cause celebre^ which takes its name from the Twins of the Serapeum, shows
us the abuse of native law thus going on. The twins had a step-mother,
Nephoris by name, who deserted their father and went to live with a soldier
at Memphis. The father subsequently died, apparently as a fugitive from
the persecutions of his wife's paramour ; his son brought the body to
Memphis for interment, but Nephoris refused to perform the funeral rites.
The goods of the deceased were deposited in the public treasury, but the
widow on paying the Government charge was allowed to recover the whole.
Apparently the principal part of the property was a house, half of which
belonged to the widow and half to the children; but Nephoris sold her half
of the house and embezzled the rents of the remainder, so that her twin
step-daughters were left destitute. They then, apparently, received an
allowance from the Temple, but were persuaded to take their half-brother
" to serve them," — ? to receive and bring their rations, — upon which he
received the oil and flax assigned to them, and went off with it to his
mother ! 2

The fictitious acknowledgment of debt given to dowerless wives, again,
in an orderly, fairly moral community, only represented a customary pro-
vision for what may be called the secondary families of well-to-do citizens ;
but in many cases the foreigner in Egypt would have no properly
" established " wife at all, and the proprietary independence of the class,

1 Cours de droit Egyptien, i. p. 33. The expression also occurs in a hymn to Ra,
Horus of the two horizons, probably with a reference to the sun sinking into the watery
abyss from which it is born. (Chabas, Choix de textes Egyptiens, p. 23.)

2 Chrestomathie, p. clxi.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 221

typified by the priestess of Bast in the novel, was no doubt productive of
much social scandal. It was therefore nominally in the interests of
morality that Ptolemy Philopator, himself the tool of favourites and
mistresses of the lowest class, introduced by edict the quasi tutelage of
women familiar to the Greeks, and made the authority of the husband
necessary in all alienations of property by the wife ; 1 thus abolishing at
one stroke the whole system of domestic law and custom familiar to the
nation. The immediate gain to foreign residents was questionable, for
it is stated that women of indifferent character, who still obtained gifts
from their husbands, were suspected of making away with the latter, in
order that the donations might not be neutralized by the marital control
newly established over the wife's property, and therefore over what was
given to her.

Native Egyptians of the better class continued for a time to keep up
the old custom under difficulties, and we find deeds in which husband and
wife say, "with one mouth," what anciently the wife would have said
alone ; the husband distributes the wife's property among the children,
and she records her consent and approval, adding, however, that the
" writings " which have previously passed between them are still to be
adhered to, these being evidently prior to the new law.

From this time donations between husband and wife practically dis-
appear at Thebes. The old customary system of family partnership is
broken up, and instead of the husband ceding all his property to his wife,
to be owned by her, and administered by himself, as trustee for their
children, the wife's property passed offhand to the husband, to be
dealt with as he pleased. There can be little doubt that the serious
revolt, which for the first time threatened the dynasty of the Lagidae in the
reign of Philopator, was provoked partly at least by this interference with
the national custom ; and the same cause explains the fact mentioned
without explanation by Polybius,2 that women took an active part in the
riots and massacres stirred up against the foreigners.

A series of wills, belonging apparently to the reigns of the second and
third Ptolemies, were included in the discovery of papyrus remains at
Gurob, by Mr. Flinders Petrie ; and as the testators are foreigners, Greeks,
Macedonians, Lycians, Libyans, Syracusans, etc., writing in Greek, Pro-
fessor MahafTy, who has edited them,3 is inclined to treat them as evidence
that the full and free right of bequeathing was generally possessed and
exercised throughout the Greek world, in a way hitherto denied by jurists,
who have regarded free testation as an essentially Roman invention. It is
however ra question, whether considering the dates of the wills, and the
state of Egyptian law, before the innovations of Ptolemy IV., we should
not rather regard them as an evidence of the extent to which the Greek
mercenaries or pensionaries had adopted Egyptian manners and customs,4

1 Cours de droit, p. 203. 2 xv. 26 sq.

3 Cunninghame Memoirs, Royal Irish Academy, 1891.

4 M. Maspero noted (Du Genre Epistolaire, vi.) the purely Egyptian tone and senti-
ment of the Greek letters in his collection.

222 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT.

first, in the matter of making wills, and, secondly, in the character of the
testamentary dispositions adopted.

Thus Peisias the Lycian bequeaths certain property in Alexandria and
Bubastis, and certain slaves to his son. " To his wife he leaves his horse,
his house in Bubastis, and apparently a female slave ; but the furniture
jointly to her and his son Pisicrates. Then follow clauses about the rights
and the condition of Axiothea, a liberated slave, who had formed part of
the dowry of the testator's wife. She is to possess certain things and in
good order, for Pisicrates is to make good any household articles that are
broken." 1 The list of articles of apparel or furniture is defective, and it
is not clear whether they are all to belong to Axiothea or to the widow ;
but the enumeration of things to be given, up to a specified value, to a
woman after the husband's death, is a common feature in purely Egyptian
documents, when it is desired to distinguish the wife's dowry from the
son's inheritance.

Another purely Egyptian feature is the enumeration of witnesses, with a
detailed description of their personal appearance ; and the habitual use
of six witnesses, the number required in ordinary contracts, as dis-
tinguished from deeds of sale affecting real property, for which sixteen
were needed. As in Egypt also, there is no mention of a kurios in the
bequests to wives and daughters. The recognition in the same document
of children by a lawful (i.e. an established) wife, and of children by
another woman, is also in accordance with Egyptian analogies. Professor
Mahaffy takes the general sense in one will to be " the property now in the
hands of my wife and children, let them retain. . . . But as regards
my son Ammonius (and his mother Melainis), I set them free, provided
they stay with me as long as I live." A clause similar to the last, in a
third will, provides for the manumission of a slave Semele, and the
testator's children by her, subject to the same condition. But except in
Egypt, it is unusual for a man's property to be "in the hands of his wife
and children," when he himself is alive ; while in Egypt this is the com-
monest occurrence. And one is tempted to see an effect of the lightness
of Egyptian bondage, in the way in which the lord of the slave looks
forward, as to something doubtful, not altogether within his control, to her
remaining with him till his death. The number of cases in which the
wife is appointed heiress is also much greater in proportion than would
naturally be the case according to any Greek customs of inheritance.

The property dealt with, besides horses and armour, houses and farms,
includes income from the Treasury or the Crown, which may be taken as
an argument for the hereditary character of the military profession ; but
a military pension, which might be bequeathed to a wife, must have come
to be held without much regard to military service. Other bequests deal
with debts due, securities or deeds, and property in furnaces of the
Arsinoite nome.

It is an interesting question both for the psychologist and the historian
1 Cunninghame Memoirs, I.e. Transcriptions \ etc., p. 38.

D OMES TIC RELA TIONS AND FA MIL Y LAW. 223

how far the other leading characteristics of the domestic states are owing
to, or influenced by, the full recognition accorded in the most ancient of
them to the proprietary rights of women, and to the primitive marriage
law which established, so far as was physically possible, the equality of
fathers and mothers in the household. Is this trait to be regarded as
cause or as effect of the other prominent characteristic of these primitive
civilizations ; namely, a degree of temperance or moderation in the
accumulation of property, which is unknown in political states? Is
acquisitiveness relatively weak in domestic states, because of the con-
sideration shown in them for women, or is more consideration shown for
the proprietary rights of women, because the instinct of acquisitiveness in
men is relatively weak ?

The significant gesture of Roman law practice aptly symbolizes the
"grasping" temperament or propensity, which seizes wealth as it seizes
power, and conceives possession incomplete unless it includes that con-
tradiction in terms, \hejus abutendi, the right to abuse as well as to enjoy
and utilize. M. Revillout's researches are mainly concerned with the
period of Egyptian decadence ; nevertheless, the contrast between the two
schools of ethical jurisprudence are even then so obvious that we cannot
do better than characterize it in his words : : " Le caractere special du
droit Egyptien c'etait justement le desinteressement, quand il s'agissait du
juste et du vrai, comme le caractere special du droit Remain, c'etait
1'egoisme, meme contrairement aux principes les plus elementaires de la
vraie justice."1

In the domestic states, personal ownership exists subject to the natural
rights of the family, and privileged families show the same respect for the
needs of feebler neighbours, that the moneyed parent does for the needs
of spouse or children. So far as there is a difference between fathers and
mothers of the same race and education, it is possible that the average
mother is less disposed towards grasping for herself; and if this be so, the
greater the customary rights of women, the less countenance will be given
within the family to the instincts of personal acquisitiveness ; and, at the
same time, the less admiration there is in the community for mere
superiority of skill or enterprise in grasping, the less disposition will there
be to count the absence of that quality as a mark of sexual inferiority.

On the other hand, the men and women of every race share more or
less in the characteristics of that race as contrasted with others. Spartan
and Roman women are masterful and grasping, and the men of China and
Egypt are pacific and deferential. The domestic races are not more
subject than others to the government of women, but the nations as a
whole approach more, in some respects, to the type of character which, in
modern times, is considered feminine, than to the masculine ideal con-
trasted with it. In some respects, but not in all, industry, trade, and organ-
ized association for the purposes of both, which are characteristic of the
Hamitic peoples, are not specially feminine traits. Opinions differ as to
1 Les obligations en droit Egyptien, p. 22.

224 OWNERSHIP IN EGYPT,

whether the nearest counterpart to England in the Old World is to be found
in Rome or Carthage, yet England is not counted among the womanly
nations. Egypt, Babylonia, and China love agriculture, industry, and com-
merce more than war ; and nations that love war first or best, even when
they take to trade, introduce into it a spirit of rivalry and aggression,
which we miss in the older commonwealths ; so that perhaps it is only by
a more pacific temper that these come nearer to the conventional feminine
ideal, than the average races of political type.

The power of using and enjoying property is naturally equal in both
sexes, and the instincts of acquisitiveness, the disposition to acquire
property by industrious exploitation of the resources of nature, are not
naturally weaker in pacific races than in others. On the contrary, the
Chinese alone of primitive races can hold their own against Europeans in
the markets of the world, while Greece and Rome never surpassed or even
equalled the industrial achievements of the Hamitic race. The great
conservative races do not look upon human life as consisting in a struggle
between human beings to secure the means of existence. Such a struggle
results perhaps in progress, but certainly in change, while stability is the
note of the domestic primitive civilizations. To secure stability it is
necessary for the rivalries of commerce to be restricted, by custom, within
limits, which will leave even the least successful competitor still able to
exist.

The ideal of the governing class is that every one shall be as well off
as his father before him, not that some should be indefinitely wealthier ;
and the law is more or less consciously and intelligently applied, to prevent
a change in the distribution of wealth, which would make some richer at
the expense of others who were made poorer. In such States, where it is
regarded as the normal function of a woman to be the " lady of the house"
and mistress of her husband's love and her children's reverence, it is con-
ceivable that the influence of women, as a vehicle for the conveyance of
property, should have been more used and relied on than in communities
where the habit of seizing, having and holding is idealized, and the power
of doing so cultivated more or less as an end in itself. The primitive
mother does not aspire to rule other households than her own, nor to
erect one of her children as a ruler over the rest ; and so far her influence
in the State is in favour of a levelling, democratic body of custom. And
since even the most peaceable of men do not choose to submit their
household to be ruled by one of their fellows, unless they are bribed or
compelled to it, a race of peaceable householders will, first or last, come
to the same judgment as a community of housewives, in favour of the
same equal, modest rights for all.

This temperament accounts for the popular conservatism of the masses,
taught by inveterate custom to leave each other's status unaltered for the
worse. It does not explain the installation of hereditary princes in
governorships of which the monarchy itself was only an enlarged copy.
The existence of kings and princes is as old as that of written records in

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 225

Egypt, and so for the moment we must treat it as an ultimate fact ; but
in States of the domestic type political organization never advanced, in
perfection or in complexity, beyond this point.

The immunity of China and Egypt from the worst forms of economic
oppression is due to the fact that the State never fell into the hands of a
wealthy class, that had tacitly entered on the inheritance of a politically
powerful class. In Egypt wealth and power were possessed by individuals
who were held individually responsible for their use, and were subject to
the censorship of a class which was highly organized, highly esteemed, and
not richly endowed with individual wealth. The economic subjection of
the masses has always been most complete and deplorable when a moneyed
oligarchy has controlled their labour, from the vantage ground of political
power conquered by a fighting aristocracy. In China and Egypt there
was no aristocracy, only feudal princes, who acted as governors when the
monarchy was strong, and as pretenders when it was weak. In China
there was no church, that is to say, no powerful, rich, and independent
hierarchy ; and until the beginning of the decline and fall of Egypt, as we
have seen, the role of the famed Egyptian priesthood was ministerial and
literary rather than despotic. There was thus in the typical domestic
kingdoms no aristocracy of arms, of birth, or of wealth. Society was sta-
tionary, and perhaps less highly organized than in lands more subject to
revolution ; but, on the other hand, it suffered less than these, from the
over-stimulation or over-nutrition of a single organ, at the expense of the
whole body politic.

p.c.

BOOK II.

ANCIENT BABYLONIA,

Mankind is made to wander, and there is none that knoweth.

Mankind, as many as pronounce a name, what do they know ?

Whether he shall have good or ill, there is none that knoweth.

* * * * *

Ask, ask !

Ask on the couch !

Ask on the seat !

Ask at the giving of the goblet !

Ask at the kindling of the fire !

Ask at the fire !

Ask when it is aglow !

Ask from the tablet and the stylus of the tablet !

Ask of the bond and the fetter !

Ask at the side of the tame beast !

Ask at the side of the wild beast !

Ask at the side of the foundation !

Ask at the edge of the marsh !

Ask at the bank of the river !

Ask by the side of the ship, at the helm, and at the prow !

Ask at the rising of the sun and the setting of the sun !

Ask among the gods of heaven, the sanctuaries of earth !

Ask among the sanctuaries of the lord and the lady !

Ask when thou comest out of the city and when thou goest into the city !

Ask when thou comest out of the city-gate and when thou enterest the city-gate !

Ask when thou comest out of the city and when thou enterest into the house !

Ask in the street !

Ask in the temple !

Ask on the road !

May the Sun-god, the judge, deliver !

Deliver, O Sun-god, lord of all that is above and below,

Director of the gods, king of the world, father of mankind !

By thy command let justice be accomplished !

— Akkadian Hymn.

CHAPTER I.
SUMERIAN CIVILIZA TION.

IN Central Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates approach most
nearly before forming the loop closed by their junction at the southern
end, it is still possible to draw a line between the rivers, along which one
may count the remains of eight or ten towns, separated from each other
by at most two or three miles of cultivated country. Townships set as
thick as those of modern Lancashire once occupied the deserted plains,
and, strange to say, the speech of the founders of Mesopotamian civiliza-
tion was akin to that of the Turks, under whose rule civilization and
wealth are banished from their earliest seat.

At the present time, the plain of the two rivers may be described roughly
as consisting for one-fourth of its area of marsh, for one-fourth of desert ;
a quarter is covered by spring floods, and affords summer pasturage to
the Bedouins, and the remaining quarter or less, undergoes some kind of
cultivation.1

At no time could it have been possible to cultivate this region continu-
ously without a system of canals, for storage as well as irrigation, on a
scale even more considerable than anything required by the first inhabi-
tants of Egypt. Without irrigation, Western Assyria is a desert for ten
months out of the twelve,2 and, without drainage, the most part of the fertile
alluvium lower down remains permanently swampy. The natural irriga-
tion provided by the floods is less certain and equable than in Egypt, the
Tigris especially being so rapid and violent in its rise, that the surface of
the fields is swept away, and, instead of the gradual elevation of the soil
from yearly deposits, which is observed in the Nile Valley, the river
mouths are choked, and the coast line extended further and further into
the Persian Gulf. It has been calculated that 5,000 or 6,000 years ago,
when the monumental history of Babylonia begins, the waters of the
Persian Gulf must have reached north of Bassorah, almost to the junction
of the two rivers, so that the ancient city of Eridu was on or near the
sea.3

1 Map of ancient Babylonia from surveys taken by order of the Indian Govern-
ment.

2 Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, i. 186.

3 If the silting up of the river mouths had always gone on at its present rate, Eridu
would have been on the coast at latest about 3000 B. c. Prof. A. H. Sayce, Hibbert
Lectures^ 1887, p. 135.

2 3o ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

Like the Chinese streams which flow through a plain lying in places
lower than the river's bed, the Euphrates was liable to change its course,,
while some of the chief canals fed from it were scarcely distinguishable
from natural rivers. The whole country around and between the two
rivers was in the most flourishing condition, and the cultivated area most
considerable, when the canals, fed respectively from the east and western
streams, crossed and met each other, so that the natural and artificial
channels together secured an equal level for the waters throughout the
whole country.1 Then every morsel of the surface shared in the fabulous
fertility for which the land was famous, and its extraordinary wealth was
the result of uninterrupted cultivation under these conditions. But the
whole system was artificial, and required an efficient domestic administra-
tion, presupposing political tranquillity. Hence the ease with which dis-
tricts fell out of cultivation after foreign conquest, and the need for works of
restoration, referred to by the great kings, who speak constantly of finding
canals blocked up, and lands fallen out of cultivation, as well as temples
and palaces ruined and in decay.

The first Sumerian inhabitants of Southern Babylonia cannot have
been able at once to effect the needful works upon a sufficient scale, but it
is possible that agricultural industry began, really for the first time, upon
the skirts of the inundation. It is not certain that they were acquainted
with the arts of agriculture and irrigation before their settlement in Kingi,
or " The Land," as they called the plain where the great cities of Erech,
Eridu, Sirgulla, and Ur were to arise. In the earliest language of the
people, the same word serves indifferently for country, mountain, and the
east,2 so that, even apart from other evidence, it might be assumed that the
earliest settlers in Southern Mesopotamia came originally from the moun-
tains east of the two rivers.

In the highland valleys of Turkestan a considerable degree of civiliza-
tion might be reached by pastoral tribes only cultivating the indigenous
fruit trees ; but it has been pointed out 3 that all primitive States, which
depend on grain for the staple food crop, have grown up in river valleys
subject to inundation, where the yearly floods leave a naturally prepared
seed-bed, pulverized, watered, and manured without preliminary effort.
Any wild grain, scattered on such a soil, would at once invite cultivation
by the result. The spade and hoe are descended from the stick with
which the ground is weeded around a patch of edible roots. The plough
and harrow are inventions dictated by the experience of plains where the
soil is fertile, because it has been brought by nature to a uniform, loose
surface, such as these tools may reproduce.

Wheat and other cereals flourished in Mesopotamia to an extent that
has never been equalled elsewhere, and it has been supposed that wheat,
which is nowhere to be found now in an undoubtedly wild state, may

1 Oppevt, Expedition scientifiqitc en Mesopotamie, vol. i. p. 154.

2 Geschichte Babyloniens imd Assyriens, Prof. Dr. Fritz Hommel, p. 245.

3 History of the New World called America. By E. J. Payne, p. 336.

•SUM BRIAN CIVILIZATION. 231

have been indigenous here. No more probable habitat has been suggested,
and the first possession of such a valuable food stuff would of itself give a
great impetus to agriculture and civilization. It is noticeable that the
chief varieties of the human species have started from the regions which
are also richest in cultivable food and fodder plants ; and without main-
taining ethnological progress to be a mere matter of diet, it may be
admitted that the connection is not entirely accidental. Anatolia, the
provinces south of the Caucasus, Persia, Beloochistan, and Cashmere are
mentioned as localities where luzern grows wild ; and, in general, West-
ern temperate Asia, the same sort of area may be regarded as the home of
clovers, beans, flax, the mulberry tree, the vine, the cherry, the apricot,
and the almond, besides the common fruits and grains first used as
staples of cultivation.1

The language of the first agriculturists was akin to that of the nomads,
who have occupied Central Asia from the beginnings of history until now,
to that of ancient Media and Armenia, and to that of modern Georgia. It
only included derivative expressions for some of the characteristic plants
and animals of the plain. The lion is called " big dog." Oxen, sheep,
goats, and probably asses, were domesticated before the settlers descended
to the plain ; and different characters were used for the domestic and the
wild ox, the latter being distinguished by the addition of " mountain" instead
of " yoke." The immigrants came from a land where the vine and date
palm were unknown;2 the vine and its fruit have only a Semitic designa-
tion, and the palm is the " sacred tree " of Eridu.3 The latter produced
without cultivation a supply of food — to say nothing of wine, sugar, timber,
and cordage — rivalling in abundance the return made by wheat when culti-
vated. Hence it was possible for a small area, naturally drained and
irrigated, to produce food for a population large enough to undertake
the considerable works which must always have been necessary to render
any considerable portion of the valley of the two rivers permanently
habitable and productive. The labour required for the purpose is such
that, on this ground alone, the antiquity until recently assigned to the
Mesopotamia!! States might have been judged insufficient.

At the time of the settlement, the development of the written character
was still at an early stage, as some of the most important primary signs are
derived from irrigation works ; the sign for a boundary represents two
canal banks with water between, while the cane-like reeds, which abound
along the rivers, furnish perhaps the very earliest root still represented in
human speech. 4 Gold, the malleable, silver, the white or shining metal,

1 Origin of Cultivated Plants. A. de Candolle, 1884, pp. IO2, 123, etc.

2 Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyrians, p. 244. Seinitischen Volker nnd
Sprachen, i. 399 (published separately and generally quoted as Vor-Semitischen Ktil-
tureri].

3 Mr. Tylor has shown that the mysterious figure with a casket and cone, so common
on the monuments, probably represents the act of fertilization of the date blossom.
Proc. Soc. Bibl. Arch., June, 1890.

4 Hommel, Vor-Semitischen Kulturen, p. 407. Gin, the earliest form of the
Sumerian word, is probably the source of the Babylonian kamt, from which certainly
Phoenician kaneh and western canna and cane are derived.

232 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

as well as tin l and iron were probably known from the first occupation of
Babylonia, copper alone having been named before that time. As MM.
Perrot and Chipiez observe,2 the inhabitants of Mesopotamia were nearer
than any other civilized nation to the sources of iron. M. Place estimated
the iron he found at Khorsabad, just north of Nineveh, at 157 tons, all of
excellent quality, which rang like a bell. Bronze weapons were strengthened
with an iron core, and it is probable that the quality of Assyrian weapons had
something to do with both the warlike triumphs of the kings and with
their prowess as huntsmen, while the latter trait again inspired the best
achievements of Assyrian art. All the traditions collected by the Greeks
agree in placing the cradle of metallurgy in the region bounded by the
Euxine, the Caucasus, the Caspian, the western edge of the tableland of
Iran, the plains of Mesopotamia, and the highlands of Cappadocia. A few
days' journey from Mosul, practically inexhaustible supplies can be obtained
from the mountains of the Tedjaris, without going as far as the northern
slopes of Armenia, the country of the Chalybes. Several passes led down
to the Tigris Valley from the plateau of Iran, and the later land trade with
India, if direct intercourse existed except by sea, probably proceeded by
Kabul, Herat, the gates of the Caspian, and Media.

Badakshan is the native land of lapis lazuli, which was so much used in
Babylonia, for colouring enamelled bricks and other purposes, that it was
known in Egypt as " blue stone of Babel." Theophrastus gives it the more
appropriate name of the Scythian stone, and the value attached to it in
Babylonia, like the Chinese enthusiasm for jade, may have been a tradition
from times when the people dwelt where the stone was found. Supposing
the fact of some prehistoric contact between the Chinese and the men of
Sumer and Akkad to be established, certainly there would be reason to be-
lieve the contact to have taken place, between the two points, whence each
of the two derived its most specially prized commodity.

The teak wood found in Lower Chaldsea must have been brought by sea,
and the cotton, also believed to have been imported,3 might as easily have
come by sea as land ; but the lapis lazuli of Badakshan must have been
brought by land caravans only, and that along a route more likely to have
been kept open after national migration, than deliberately chosen by
speculative traders in quest of they knew not what.

The whole of the mountain ranges from the Persian Gulf to the Black
Sea are now believed to have been inhabited by peoples more or less
remotely related to the first inhabitants of Chaldsea. The difference be-
tween the grade of civilization in the mountains and the plain is no more
than the material advantages of the latter will explain ; Elam, Susiana, and
Chaldsea were probably settled at about the same time by tribes probably
at about the same stage of culture, and it was not till afterwards, when the
superiority of the lowlanders had declared itself, that Elam began, to borrow

1 So Hommel ; Sayce renders this lead.

2 A History of Art in Chaldcca and Assyria (Eng. trans.), vol. ii. p. 312.

3 Hibbert Lectures, 1887, p. 138. Sindhu or muslin in Akkadian ideographs =
" vegetable cloth."

SUMERIAN CIVILIZATION. 233

from its western neighbours. Gudea boasts of the conquest of Anzan, an
Elamite State believed to be identical with the ancestral land of Cyrus,1
who speaks of himself and his ancestors as kings of Elam. Elam in 3,000
B.C. was already a State of some degree of civilization, possessing cities,
though not apparently a written character. It continued for something
like 2,000 years to be the rival of Babylonia, and after that became the
chief ally of the southern kingdom against Assyria, till it became the
master of both under Cyrus.2

The first settlers in Southern Babylonia brought with them a complete
vocabulary of house-building ; doors with hinges, and bolts and thresholds ;
walls and beams and bricks were named ; 3 and the householder dwelt
within a " ringed fence "; roads, ships (for the river), and cities existed.
Bows and swords were made, but the character of the people was mainly
pacific ; they were builders and cultivators, executing, like the Egyptians,
colossal works with simple appliances, by force of patience and keen ob-
servation. They knew, better than the architects of Venice, that artificial
foundations were necessary to those who try to build upon a swamp ; and
they knew, what British farmers within the last century found it hard to
believe, that water would always find its way into an open pipe, and used
the discovery to secure the efficient drainage of the foundation mounds of
their houses, palaces, and temples.4

With all its wisdom this wonderful race drew like children or Aztecs.
Its religion was naturalistic ; it consisted in the recognition of a " Spirit of
heaven" and a "Spirit of earth," 5 and various other powers of good and
ill, knowable, like fire and the palm tree, and unknowable, like pain and
sickness. These spirits were not worshipped, but "conjured;" hence
charms were older than litanies, and the attempt to find signs to reproduce
the spoken word was stimulated by the desire to give permanent power to
a protective spell. Amulets are written among people who write nothing
else, and the first people capable of inventing the art of writing may have
applied it first to this purpose. But there is a great gulf between picture

1 Kurascli itself is a Kassite-Elamite word signifying "Shepherd." (Hommel, Gesch.
Bab. n. Ass., p. 273, ;/.)

2 The malice of Assurbanipal has to some extent defeated its own purpose. In the
annals of his eighth campaign he boasts of how he destroyed the temples of Elam, and
reduced her gods and goddesses to dust : " Their concealed woods in which no stranger
(?) rests nor enters the compass thereof, my warriors penetrated therein, beheld their
secret places, and burnt them with fire. The great places (i.e. tombs) of their kings,
the earlier and the later, who had not feared my lords, Assur and Istar, and had rebelled
against the kings my fathers, I destroyed, I wasted them and let them see the sun.
Their bones I took to Assyria, their spirits I condemned to restlessness, and I cut off
from them food and the pouring forth of water." In compensation he enables distant
ages to assert that the ancient kings of Elam were interred with care in durable
monuments and commemorated with sacrifices and libations of the Egyptian type.
(Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek, edited by E. Schrader, ii. p. 207.)

3 Vor-Setnitischen KuUiiren, p. 399.

4 See for figured drain pipe, Gesch. Bab. 11. Ass., p. 217.

5 The day of the resting of the moon-god is a lucky day, " the day when the spirits
of heaven and earth are adored." (Hib. Lect.,p. 75.) Later Semitic religion adopted
300 Igigi, or spirits of heaven, and 600 Annunaki, or spirits of earth. (T.S.B.A., viii. 2,
p. 250.) For the latter number, see/^/, p. 342.

234 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

writing like that of the North American Indians, or even a simple system
of hieroglyphic drawing, and a written character ; and it is probable that
this gulf was first passed in Southern Babylonia. The difference between
Egyptian and Sumerian writing is very much due to the fact that the
Egyptians were better draughtsmen than the Sumerians when their cha-
racter was fixed. The few strokes, with which a crowned, sitting figure was
scrawled, were about as much like a mummy as a statue, but they stood
for " king," l and, as one stroke after another was dropped or dis-
torted to suit the convenience of the scribe, the distinction between ideo-
grams and phonograms faded, and the character became more and more
exclusively one of syllabic signs.

In this form it was borrowed and adapted by the earliest Semitic in-
habitants of Babylonia and by the Assyrians, but, with them, all the poly-
phones or signs which have varying values, are equally meaningless ;
whereas, in the oldest dialect of the country, there is one sense in which
the sound and meaning of every character agree. 2 The custom of writing
with a wooden style upon clay tablets, which produced the wedge-shaped
or arrow-headed marks now so familiar, was of later introduction, but when
fairly established it contributed to efface whatever lingering traces of
pictorial origin the character still retained. A simple example will
show how the original signs were modified by the implements used. The
archaic sign for a circle was [""I, obviously a rude way of drawing Q, but
the cuneiform character is j-~T , which looks much more complicated, and
much less like a circle ; on reflection, however, it becomes apparent
that four strokes of the graver, beginning at the right-hand top corner,
could not produce any nearer approach to a plain square than this, and
of course more elaborate figures must have been still more distorted.

The resources of the character for literary purposes may be measured
by the fact that the number of Sumerian characters known exceeds five
hundred. All of these must have served originally as ideograms, repre-
senting, no doubt, a very limited vocabulary, though presumably sufficient
for the purposes for which it was commonly used. Only about two hundred
of these characters are in common use for later Babylonian and Assyrian
texts, and the Assyriologist who is familiar with 250 can read any ordi-
nary inscription. A hundred characters, in addition to their original
signification, stand as signs for syllables of two letters — vowel, consonant;
or consonant, vowel ; but these quasi alphabetic signs are used also
for syllables consisting of a vowel between two consonants. A larger
number (125) are used exclusively for syllables of the latter kind, the
other characters serving exclusively as ideograms. The distinction be-
tween signs expressing two sounds and three led to nothing in Sumerian,
or in the Semitic- Akkadian language of later Babylonia, because the
elements of compound words were mostly complete in themselves; and

1 Gesch. Bab. u. Ass., p. 36, fig. 2. -r-.

- It is as if the word "man" were represented by two legs, f/ll , and then this sign
used for the first syllable of manners, manifold mansions, etc. Hi)

SUMERIAN CIVILIZATION. 235

as in Chinese, it was the aim of the learned to keep up a kind of associa-
tion between the phonetic value and the primary meaning of every cha-
racter. But these characters were admirably adapted to suggest the
possibility of alphabetic writing to the Persians, who in that way made
a smaller number of cuneiform characters l serve to express all the sounds
of a totally different class of language.

According to the current view, the religion of the men of Kingi, before
their character was invented, resembled the crude belief in what may be
called natural magic which distinguishes the nomad tribes who call their
medicine men Shamans. " The inhabitant of Babylonia," Professor Sayce
writes,3 " was as yet in the purely Shamanistic stage of religious develop-
ment. The world about him was peopled by supernatural powers, each of
which was to him a si or ' spirit.' But it was not a spirit in our sense of
the word, nor in the sense in which the term was used by Semitic scribes
of a later day. The zi was simply that which manifested life, and the test
of the manifestation of life was movement. . . . Hence the objects
and forces of nature were all assigned a zi or spirit."

This is no doubt true, but the statement is equally compatible with the
existence of savage fetichism or rationalism as severe as that of Confucius.
Whether we are to credit the men of Sumer and Akkad with one or the
other depends upon the kind of objects which took the front place in
their thoughts ; for their life must have taken its character from the pre-
siding "spirits" they instinctively acknowledged.

The most ancient sentence of human composition now known is probably
the Sumerian version of the formula : " Conjure, oh Spirit of Heaven,
conjure, oh Spirit of Earth." More than 5,000 years ago it was in the
mouths of men, and even then probably represented a tradition of ancient
wisdom.

But, as has been pointed out, to classify, to conceive in one group, as
an object of invocation, the forces of heaven, and in contradistinction to
these, the forces of earth, is a flight of philosophic abstraction far beyond
the range of Shamanistic or fetichistic superstition. Even at this early
day, the Mesopotamia:! founders of human civilization had attained to the
same conception of the universe as the Chinese. The " Great Gods " ot
the primaeval pantheon were the spirit of Heaven, the spirit of Earth and
the tutelary spirit of the City. The two first are not disguised under any
proper name, and the latter is originally only the god of Erech, or Eridu,
or Ur, — the "good city," the "place of dwelling," or the "place of pro-
tection,"— sharing the name of the city, as the city shares the fortunes of
the god. The fertile earth, the fertilizing skies and sun, are the great and
essentially beneficent cosmogonic spirits.

It was a speculative afterthought, not unscientific as speculations go, to

1 Gesch. Bab. u. Ass. p. 44 ff. The cuneiform alphabet, if one may call it so, of Persia,
consisted of thirty-four signs for twenty-two letters, the duplicates representing syllables
in which the same consonant is repeated before different words.

2 Bibbert Lectures ', pp. 327, 8.

236 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

assume a primaeval chaos and a watery abyss, from the latter of which, by
mysterious generation, men and spirits and all their works were to proceed.
The " spirit of a thing," according to primitive and Chinese rationalism,
means something quite immaterial, the sum of its tendencies or its habitual
action. It does not mean a goblin or miniature god or demon, associated
with the real thing, as Bel is god of the sun, or Istar the goddess of
human love.1

It is generally agreed that the spells and incantations which have been
preserved on bi-lingual tablets by the care of Assurbanipal, represent
the most ancient compositions of the early inhabitants of Babylonia.2 We
gather from them that, 5,000 years ago as now, the lower course of the
river valleys was, literally, a hot-bed of fever : the "fever demon who de-
parts not " was even more dreaded than the evil wind or the hostile
spirits of the field, the mountain, the sea, or the tomb. Among benignant
spirits are the divine lady and lord of the earth, of the stars, of the seeds,
of the firmament, and of the dayspring of life. The "spirit of the divine
lady of growth, the shepherd of the pastures," the spirit of the fire-god, the
corn-god, and the " spirit of the pure cloud spirit, the daughter of the
deep/' are all invoked.

Fire is the son of the watery abyss, an exalted hero in the land, deter-
mining the fate of everything that bears a name. Copper and tin are
smelted by it, gold and silver are purified, and the advance of the enemy
by night is turned away.3 Fire must have been procured by friction, for
the character used for it is composed of two ideographs — wood and light —
or the wood of light.4 The watery abyss is the origin of all things. When
the waters of the sea and the marshland, of the Tigris and the Euphrates,
the water of the pool, and the water of the river all fail, men resort with
spells to the god whom they regard as their father, the author of their
being. The ebbing sea, the rising sea, the flood, the high tide, enumerated
in another spell, make up together a list of the aspects of water akin to
that in the Egyptian text which describes all earthly objects known to the
god of wisdom.

Evil may be wrought by the evil eye and the evil tongue, and by " him
who is the possessor of the images of a man;" and the wide-spread
superstition according to which similar power may be conveyed to an
enemy by the possession of any portion of the person or its near belong-
ings, seems to have dictated the destruction or concealment of nail-
parings, hair, old rags, or rings, or other exuviae.5 A curse rested on "the
feaster who, in his feasting, his crumbs had not collected ; " but one can-

1 The Samoans have a conception which is quite as metaphysical as this ; everything of
importance has a mana of its own, the idea being, apparently, a mixture of what we
should call " power " or " virtue " and good fortune. Cf. The Melanesians, R. H. Cod-
rington, D.D., p. 56. In the Solomon Islands a head is sacrificed to obtain mana for a new
war canoe. (The Solomon Islands and their Natives, M. B. Guppy, pp. 1 6, 7.) Shamanism
is a degenerate form of this natural animism, partly influenced, it may be, by contact
with later anthropomorphic theologies.

2 Gesch. Bab. ti. Ass., p. 253. 3 //;., p. 192.

4 Hibbert Lectures, p. 1 80. 5 11)., pp. 442, 3.

SUMERIAN CIVILIZATION. 237

not tell whether the danger is the same as in the preceding case, or whether
the neglect to gather up the fragments is held to betoken culpable ex-
travagance. Monstrous beings, unborn and sexless, are believed in and
dreaded, and in the earliest texts — before Semitic influence led to the
association of sin with judgments, and so made calamities a thing to be
repented of instead of " conjured " — one seems to recognise the feeling that
normal human life is good, and whatever is not human, or is adverse to
humanity, is monstrous or evil. If the spirit of heaven gives deliverance,
and the spirit of earth conjures the powers of evil, the granting of prayers
to the modest Sumerian promises no more than this : " That I may eat
during the day, that I may drink during the day, that I may sleep during
the day, that I may satisfy myself during the day." *

On the other hand, the maleficent powers of the air are conceived
emphatically as destitute of all human qualities, as well as antagonistic to
human prosperity. As the Chinese classic observes, " Great winds have a
path, they come from the broad open valleys ; " and the great winds of
Southern Babylonia, hot and dry from the desert in summer, and sometimes
freezing cold in winter,2 were dreaded by the settlers as their worst foes.
The growth of trees and buildings gradually reduces the influence of these
winds to insignificance, but the earliest settlements may have seen their
laboriously reared crops blown out of the ground or buried in the dust.
The evil spirits of the air were conceived to be seven in number, why we do
not know, though the number may possibly have been suggested by the
seven planets.

These winds that create evil are likened to destructive reptiles : " Chil-
dren monstrous, messengers of the pest demon are they ! Throne-bearers
of the goddess of Hades, the whirlwind which is poured upon the land are
they ! Seven evil gods, seven evil consuming spirits are they ! Male they
are not, female they are not. They are the dust storm, the wanderers (?).
Wife they possess not, child is unborn to them. Order and kindliness
they know not. From the house of the mountain came they forth. Of
Ea are they the foes. To trouble the canal in the street are they set.
Evil are they, seven are they ! la city after city do they cause the
rainy wind. The rushing blast of the wind which produces darkness on
a clear day are they ! In heaven and earth they have no dwelling.
Their name in heaven and earth exists not." 3 The fire-god reveals
their enmity, and Merodach, the merciful son of Ea, teaches the spells
by which they may be bound.

This picturesque vision of the shadow side of nature outlines for us at
once the life which man, " the son of his god," desires to enjoy. He
wishes to live at peace in an enclosed city, approached by " the road, the

1 Hibbert Lectures, p. 444.

2 Actual frost is not unknown in Babylonia, owing to the impregnation of the soil with
salt where the sea has retired, and the Arabs have been known to fall from their horses
paralysed by the unaccustomed cold.

3 Hibbert Lectures, p. 207. Cf. Nansen, Eskimo Life, p. 266, for maleficient magic
powers attributed to human recluses.

238 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

daughter of the gods," l from other cities, divided into quarters by four
great streets, and traversed also by canals, giving access to the network
of irrigation cuttings through the fieids outside, and furnishing, when they
were first dug out, materials for the " holy mound " upon which the seven-
staged tower or temple of the god of the city was to stand. Within the
city is the house ; not open to all comers or common to a clan, but
adapted to the free privacy of family life ; there the wife is set in honour,
" glad and gladdening " 2 like the mid-day sun. The simile was a standing
one, for the sun-god, Merodach, is apostrophised : " Like a wife thou be-
havest thyself, cheerful and rejoicing." The worshippers of the sun-god,
the judge of the world and director of its laws, do not think it unworthy of
his majesty to pray, " May the wife whom thou lovest come before thee
with joy !" The god Ea, the primaeval spirit, has a mother as well as a
daughter and a first-born son ; and the phrase, " as a woman fashioned
for a mother made beautiful,"3 shows that the Egyptians did not stand
alone in the old world in idealizing the primary relations of life.

As in Egypt, the father, the mother, and the elder brother are the three
essential elements in the family. The moon-god of Nipur is the first-born of
Mullil, the lord of the Under World. The name of the great temple of Nebo
was the "house of the legitimate" or "established son," 4 and, as in Egypt,
the god Thoth was known as " the eldest " (son of Horus), so the name
of " the first born Bel," as Nebo is called, is supposed to furnish the name
of the sun-god worshipped on the island of Bahrein.5 The sun is invoked
as " a god who setteth at rest his father's heart." The elder brother is
named immediately after the father and mother, as one whose curse may
need to be removed by Merodach. Other relationships are seldom men-
tioned in the early texts, 6 and, as a rule, the enumeration ends with
father and son, mother and daughter, brother and brother, friend and
friend, neighbour and neighbour, though in one hymn the " brother of the
mother of the male god " 7 is twice referred to. In a later poem the
solitude of the mountains is described in what is very likely a traditional
formula : " No mother inhabits it and (cares for) him, no father inhabits it
with him, no priest who knows him (is there)." 8

As Prof. Sayce observes, the pre-Semitic beliefs of Babylonia "betrayed
no consciousness of human sin, and the necessity of finding in this an

1 The conceptions which gave their character to the sacred roads of later ages clearly
originated with the people whose hymns to the gods include allusions to "a road that
benefits men, that pacifies mankind." (Hibbert Lee., p. 504.) The class of benefits con-
ferred is indicated by other idioms. Mr. Bertin says (P.S.B.A., 1884, p. 86) that
" harrani " road is frequently used for "business," "trade" in general, e.g. Kaspu
harrani, etc., silver (money) of the road of So-and-So, exactly as in modern slang com-
mercial travellers are gentlemen of the " road."

2 Hibbert Lectures,' V* 171. 3 //;., p. 296. 4 //;., p. 114.

5 The god is called En-zag in one inscription ; zag being a translation of first-born.
Journ. Roy. As. Soc., 1880. The Island of Bahrein, p. 189. Note by Sir H. C.
Rawlinson.

G A Semitic hymn names "the seven branches of the house of my father" as among
those who. may have to be overcome. {Hibbert Lectures, p. 321.)

7 Hibbert Lectures, p. 504. 8 Ib., p. 295.

SUMERIAN CIVILIZATION. 239

explanation of malevolent action on the part of the gods above ; " 1 and
the priest who is thus regarded as an essential part of the human group is
merely a familiar — one who knows a man's name, and can therefore cast
the spells needed for his protection. When the worshipper calls himself
the son of his god, it is evidently as expecting or desiring the protection of
a parent, not as promising the obedience or devotion of a son. The gods
are adjured to be placable like a father or a mother who rejoices in having
given birth to a child. And similarly, when the early kings and patesis 2
speak of themselves as beloved by the goddess of their city, the idea pro-
bably is, that the erection of fine statues and temples inspires the deity
with a genuine human liking for the prince who bespeaks them. Like
the Egyptian kings, the Babylonian gods are supposed to recognise a
" favourite " as well as an eldest son. The god Gal-alim is the favourite
son of the god Ningirsu, and the divinities have favourite cities and
favourite adorers, just as the kings and priests have favourite gods and
goddesses.

When we speak, however, of the god Ningirsu and the goddess Nina, or
in the same way of other members of the Sumerian pantheon, there is an
inevitable mistranslation or overtranslation, as the ancient language has no
mark of gender. The word Nin, used for both, signifies "lord" or "lady ; "
the primary meaning being " the great one ; " 3 and the proper name
follows the common noun signifying divinity, a peculiarity which has led
to some confusion, as the late Semitic translators did not always know
whether an Akkadian proper name was male or female, and sometimes
guessed wrong. The genealogy of the chief gods worshipped at Sirgulla —
or, as according to Mr. Pinches, it should be called, Lagash — can be made
out from one of the inscriptions of Gudea.4

Anna, -the sky-god, the Anu of the Semites, is mentioned in the first
place. The goddess Ban, " the mother," " the good lady," " the mistress
of abundance," is called " the elder daughter of Anna ; " she has much in
common with the Greek Demeter, and under the name of " the august
deity, Gatumdug," she is revered as mother of Lagash. Ninni or Nana,
who answers to the Semitic Istar, is also a daughter of Anna, and it
is not impossible that this dynasty, as one may call it, is really more
ancient than that of Ellilla or Bel, "the lord of the mountain of the world,"
who is mentioned next to Anna in the same inscription. Ningharsag,
" the mistress of the mountain," is the wife of Ellilla and the mother of
the gods. The moon-god, Enzu, otherwise Sin, " whose name none pro-
nounces," is their eldest son. Ningirsu, or Ninib, called the " son and
warrior " of Ellilla, is the husband of Bau, the daughter of Anna, so that

1 Hibbert Lectures, p. 314.

2 The title borne by priest-kings, or viceroys.

3 Hibbert Lectures, p. 1 76.

4 Records of the Past, N.S., vol. ii. pp. 85, 6. See also the 'whole of the late M.
Amiaud's Introduction to and translations of the Telloh inscriptions. (/£., vol. i. pp. 42-
47, and 'vol. ii. pp. 72-109.) We adopt the form Lagash with the less reluctance that the
alternatives— Sir-bulla, -burra, -gulla, and Sir- or Shir-purla— are variously spelt.

240 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

the two lines of descent are here united. The fourth god in order of
precedence however is Enki, " the lord of the earth," whose word is un-
changeable, who is better known as Ea, the lord. of the waters. He has
a daughter, Nina, who is mentioned next after Ningirsu ; Samas, the sun-
god, and Pasagga, a fire-god, " the master workman of men," l are also sons
of Ea.

The arrangement of the gods in families, with two and three generations,
is evidently artificial, and one reason for supposing Anna and Ea to be
more ancient than Bel is that the latter is represented as having two grand-
sons, Gal-alim and Dun-shagana, son of Ningirsn. Ea has a grandchild,
but it is in the more archaic female line, " Nin-marki, the good lady, the
eldest daughter of the goddess Nina ; " '2 and the seven sons of the goddess
Bau are not associated with their mother's husband Ningirsu, as Gal-alim
and Dun-shagana are. Nowhere else, except in Egypt, do theogonies in-
sist upon primogeniture in the younger generation of divinities, and the
prominence given to the same notion here is conclusive as to the im-
portant place assigned in the family to the eldest son, and even to the
eldest daughter ; while the family tree of Anna and Ea show that, also as
in Egypt, the father of the mother was regarded in some sort as the real
founder of the family. Prior to this earliest genealogical fiction, the god-
dess Bau was probably a coeval alternative conception, representing the
abysmal water-deep like Ea himself.

In the time of Gudea, when the Sumerian regime was several hundred
years old, it is clear that the eldest daughter only acted for the family
when there was no son. " In the house where there is no son, it is its
daughter who new offerings (?) has consecrated ; for the statue of the god
before the mouth she has placed them." This fact is stated as one of
the signs of good government in the city ; and we may argue that the
custom regarding inheritance was less exceptionally favourable to women
than in Egypt, since their right to inherit in the second place was liable to
be contested in time of disorder. But the number and importance of the
female divinities adored, as well as the precedence accorded to them,
proves that the current estimate of the sex had more in common with
that of the Egyptians than of the Semitic and Aryan nations. One of the
earliest inscribed stones is offered by one Ur-Ellilla for the life of the
patesi Ur-Bau, and consecrated " for the life of the wife of his son; " 3 and
one of the earliest statues in existence represents a female figure.

Scarcely if at all less ancient than the earliest Sumerian spells and in-
scriptions are fragments of the gnomic morality of the ancient sages.
Ea is the god of wisdom, as well as of those firstfruits of human civili-
zation, the city and the house. And accordingly we find it written: "If the
king decrees according to the writings of Ea, the great gods will establish

1 Statue B of the Louvre, Col., viii. 1. 64.
'2 Records, N.S., i. 77. K. B., iii. i. 25.

3 Records, N.S., ii. 74. Jensen (Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek, iii. I, 25) reads, "For
the life of his wife and of his son."

SUM BRIAN CIVILIZATION. 241

him in good report and the knowledge of justice." i A tablet "with warn-
ings to kings against injustice" embodies the ancient doctrine on this
subject, which several passages in the Telloh inscriptions show to have
been formulated before the age of Gudea. Here are a few of the omens
enumerated : —

"If the king avenges not according to law, the people perish, his
country is enfeebled.

" He avenges not according to the law of his country, the god Ea, the
king of destinies, his destiny changes and by another replaces him.

" He avenges not according to (the wishes of) his princes, his days are long.

" He avenges not according to the statutes, his country knows invasion."

The ancient king is clearly not an autocrat but a judge, a minister of the
laws, whose duty it is to keep the peace by executing justice on evil doers ;
but he. must follow the law in his judgments, and not the wishes of his
great men, or his dynasty will be superseded, to borrow the Chinese
phrase, by a fresh " appointment of Heaven." In this tablet the " son "
or citizen of Nipur, Sippara, and Babylon are referred to — in that order — as
concerned in the sayings ; so that its original composition must go back to
a time when Sippara was more important than Babylon, and Nipur than
Sippara, that is, probably, to a time anterior to the reign of Sargon of
Agade. The tablet proceeds to declare that if the ruler smites the son of
the city of Sippara and gives (? him to) another, the sun-god shall appoint
another judge. ... If the sons of the city of Nipur for judgment
have thrown themselves (before) him, and he takes gifts and smites them,
" the god Bel brings a foreign enemy against him and destroys his army."
If the sons of Babylon bring silver and give bribes, and the judges of the
Babylonians preside, and to their entreaty turn, " Merodach will give his
enemies place over him and his goods and treasure shall be theirs." The
giving of bribes is punished by men as well as the receiving them by the
gods.a If the son of Nipur, Sippara or Babylon gives bribes, " into prison
he shall be caused to enter."

One more clause must be quoted, because of its curious contrast with
all the other indications of Sumerian humanity and culture. " If the sons
of Nipur, Sippara or Babylon let their warhorses feed upon their children,
or offer them to warhorses, the king's armies are slain, his soldiers are food
to the god of famine, his fields and herds perish." Whether this savage
custom prevailed among the tribes of Turkestan, whence the Sumerians
are supposed to have come, or amongst the nomads of the Syrian desert,
must remain an open question. Neither stock was incapable of practising
human sacrifices,3 and if it were not that horses seem to have been

1 Ilibbert Lectures, p. 368. Records of the Past, vii. p. 119.

In a Semitic hymn, the Sun-god is apostrophized as "Judge unbribed." (Hibbert
Lectures, p. 320.)

3 In the '• Observations of Bel," it is written, " on the high places the son is burnt "
(Rib. Lect., p. 78); Mr.iBall (P.S.B.A., 1892, p. 151) argues from the context that
" this difficult line . . . refers to the effect of weather upon the crops." But it is
probably to a Babylonian god (or goddess) that the men of Sepharvaim sacrificed their
children (2 Kings xvii. 31).

P.C. R

242 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

borrowed from the highlands of Asia Minor rather than Central Asia, we
might regard it as a piece of Tatar barbarism, which the settlers were
anxious to renounce. In any case it is a fresh proof of the antiquity of
Sumerian civilization that we find it, and its literature, existing in immediate
contact with such archaic savagery.

The colophon of the above tablet may be quoted as a general acknow-
ledgment of the boons conferred on the student of history by the versatile
Sardanapalus, who will be remembered in the future for his disinterested
love of learning, no less than for his savagery on the warpath and his
licentiousness in the harem. It is endorsed "Tablet beginning: If the
king according to law avenges not, he dies," and dated " Palace of
Assurbanipal, the king of multitudes, the king of Assyria, to whom Nebo
and Tasmit gave broad ears, his seeing eyes regarded the engraved
characters of the tablets ; this writing which none of the kings which went
before me regarded, the secrets of Nebo, the literature of the library so
much as is suitable, on tablets I wrote, I engraved, I explained and for the
inspection of my subjects in the midst of my palace I placed."

These moral precepts, which the Assyrian king had copied for preserva-
tion in his library, were the commonplaces of oral tradition under the
Sumerian kings and priests. Gudea records his observance of them in a
fashion which recalls the autobiographical epitaphs of Egyptian worthies.
In the most important of his inscriptions,1 upon a statue of himself set up
in the temple of the god Ningirsu, we have lists of his gifts to the gods,
lists of the gods by whose favour his power was established, and also of
the circumstances which qualify his city for distinction as a chosen place
of worship. "After that the god Ningirsu had turned towards his city a
favourable gaze (and) Gudea had chosen as the faithful shepherd of the
country, (and) among the divisions (?) of men had established his power,
then he purified the city and cleansed it. He has laid the foundation and
deposited the foundation cylinder." The meaning of the next few lines is
doubtful, and is conjecturally rendered by Amiaud as referring to the
banishment of sorcerers and demon worshippers, and it is possible that the
gods of Gudea were consciously intended to supersede the " spirits " of
the old naturalism as objects of adoration ; in which case of course the
experts of the old school, which had no temples or endowments, might
have been regarded as enemies to the new cult. However this may be,
Gudea goes on to relate : " The temple of the god Ningirsu in all respects
in a pure place he has constructed. No tomb has been destroyed (?), no
sepulchral urn has been broken (?), no son has ill-treated his mother (?).
The ministers, the judges, the doctors, the chiefs, during the execution of
the work have worn garments of . . . ? "

The next four lines are also doubtful, but seem to imply that no inter-

1 On the so-called statue B. of the Louvre. (Amiaud, Records of the Past, N.S., ii. 76.)
Iti col. 2, 1. 5, the word conjecturally translated as "architect" by Amiaud was
rendered by Jensen (K.B., iii. 1-29) "spender," or " afTorder of treasures," and sub-
sequently "of enduring name." (Zeitschrift fiir Assyriohgie, viii. 2, 233.)

SUMERIAN CIVILIZATION. 243

ments had taken place within the city, so that it had not been polluted by
funeral services of lamentation. The sanitary rule against intramural
interments observed by the Egyptians and Chinese as well as the Babylon-
ians, must of course have been introduced after city life began, and it is
quite natural that the reason, given for its introduction, should have been
not to pollute the habitation of the gods, since epidemics or other unusual
mortality would naturally be taken as a sign of the god's displeasure. A
living faith in the Divine powers of nature is as effective in promoting
obedience to " natural laws " as the most scientific materialism, and indeed
more so, while man's perceptions are unblunted by theories, and he
sympathises instinctively with the real forces which surround him. The
"sepulchral urns" of this period were earthenware vessels, either shallow
and circular or cylindrical, in which the corpse was placed, the lid or
upper half being then closed with clay. Priests of a certain class and
female mourners took part in. the funeral ceremonies, and some half-ritual-
istic, half-hygienic theories of purity, such as prevailed in Egypt, are
probably indicated by the mention of the garments worn by persons of
consequence while the temple was in course of construction.

What follows is still more significant : " On the territory of Shirpurla a
man (at variance with his neighbour) to the place of oath has taken no
one;"1 in other words there have been no lawsuits; "a brigand has
entered the house of no one," presumably because the whole people were
prosperous and well governed. All these are conditions precedent to the
result — the completion and dedication of the temple E-Ninnu for the god
Ningirsu by " his king," Gudea.

We read next of the precious woods and stones, gold dust and bitumen (?)
imported for the temple, and the dedication to the god of a statue of
hard stone, which the patesi had caused to be cut, and had named " O my
king, whose temple I have built, may life be my recompense." The life-
likeness of the statues of this reign is evident from the broken remains
which have reached us, and the feeling of the period is recorded in the
inscription : " Gudea unto the statue has given command : ' To the statue of
my king speak ! ' ': The antiquity, the interest and the typical character of
the remainder of the inscription will be a sufficient excuse for quoting
from it at length : " After that the temple E-Ninnu, his favourite temple,
he (Gudea) had constructed, he relaxed his mind ; he washed his hands.
For seven days corn was not ground.2 The female slave has been made
the equal of her mistress ; the male slave has been made the equal of his
master ; in my city the chief of his subject has been made the equal.3
All that is evil from this temple I have removed. Over the commands of

1 Jensen has : " No man possessed of reason has gone to 'a place of conjuration,' or
entered the house of a (?) magician : " a good example of the uncertainty attaching to all
early versions of an obscure text, and also of the extent to which a provisional reading
may be recommended or otherwise by its sense.

2 K.B., iii. i, 41. Amiaud has : "I have remitted penalties, I have given presents.
During seven days obeisance has not been exacted."

3 K.B.% l.c.y " The strong (?) now rested beside the weak (?).".

244 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

the goddess Nina and the god Ningirsu I have carefully watched. A
fault the rich man has not committed ; l all that he desired (?) the strong
man has not done. The house where there was no son it was its daughter
who new offerings 2 has consecrated ; for the statue of the god before the
mouth she has placed them. Of this statue neither in silver, nor in
alabaster, nor in copper, nor in tin, nor in bronze let any one undertake
the execution ! Let it be of hard stone ! "

Then follow denunciations of whomsoever in future may remove the
statue or deface its inscription, or substitute his god for Ningirsu, the god
of Gudea, or transgress the judgments and revoke the gifts of Gudea and
his predecessors, men of noble race, the patesis of Shirpurla. Then
twenty-two gods and goddesses, most of whom have already been named,3
are adjured to change the destiny of the man who ventures to change the
words or transgress the judgments of Gudea. " Like an ox may he be
slain in the midst of his prosperity ! Like a wild bull may he be felled in
the plenitude of his strength ! As for his throne, may those even whom
he has reduced to captivity overthrow it in the dust ! . . . His name
in the temple of his god may they efface from the tablets ! May his god
not look upon the ruin of his country ! May he ravage it with rains from
heaven ! May he ravage it with the waters of the earth ! May he
become a man without a name ! May his princely race be reduced to
subjection ! May this man, like every other who has acted evilly towards
his chief, afar, under the vault of heaven, in no city whatsoever find a
habitation ! But may the peoples proclaim the greatness of the champion
of the gods, the lord Ningirsu ! " 4

To remit penalties and give presents is still, as of old, the Chinese
emperor's way of celebrating auspicious anniversaries, and in spite of the
tentativeness of the above translation, one can scarcely be wrong in sup-
posing the lines concerning the virtuous forbearance of the rich and
powerful to be inspired by a theory of their besetting sins, like that set
forth in the Li-Ki.5 The curious passage which intervenes, about a seven
days' festival, in which all class distinctions are abolished, clearly shows
that the Babylonian Saturnalia, the prototype of all later ones, had a
religious origin. It was thought agreeable to the gods that masters and
chiefs should waive their authority for a while, and the Sacsean feast of
five days, described by Athenoeus after Berosus,6 during which a slave
from each house was dressed as a king and treated as master, is clearly
identical with that celebrated by Gudea. Professor Sayce suggests that
the festival of Zag-mu-ku, held in the time of Nebuchadnezzar at the
beginning of the year, may be the same as the Sacsea, which, however,
tvas said to be held in the eleventh month. If the feast was originally
celebrated at a particular season of the year, its nominal date would vary
unless the calendar was corrected by periodical revisions.

1 A'.B., p. 43, "The wealthy did not (what was) not. . . '."

2 K.B., Oil for lighting. 8 Ante, pp. 239, 240. 4 Records, N.S., ii. 87.
5 See inf., vol. ii. book iv. chap. viii. 6 77ie Deipnosophists, iv. c. 22.

SUMERIAN CIVILIZATION. 245

Taking the inscription as a whole the author may be said to have four
principal ideas : to please the gods by gifts, to please them by good be-
haviour,1 to receive their favour and assistance in return, and to have his
monuments respected by posterity. Conduct was thus at least one quarter
of the ruler's religion ; and an interesting text shows it to have been of
equal importance in the eyes of private citizens. Exactly in the manner
of the Confession in the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead, the ancient Baby-
lonian asks himself: "Have I estranged father and son, brother and
brother, or friend and friend ? Have I not freed the captive, loosed the
bondman, and him who lay in prison? Have I resisted my god or
despised my goddess ? Have I taken to myself the land of another or
entered my neighbour's house with evil purpose? Have I approached my
neighbour's wife ? Have I shed the blood of a man or robbed any one of
his garments ? " 2 — all of these being offences which might account for any
heavenly visitation.

A kind of natural selection takes place among the records of the past,
and it may fairly be assumed that the class of documentary evidence which
survives longest and in largest quantities, does so because it was originally
most abundant and most cared for. It is therefore allowable to judge of
the character of Babylonian, or rather Sumerian civilization, from the
earliest fragments, since no assignable influence has been at work to lend
it a false air of humanity. The authors of the History of Art in Chaldcza
and Assyria had no foregone conclusion on this subject to support, yet
they note as a feature common to Egypt, China, and Chaldaea, that the
secret of their longevity lay in the permanent forces by which society
reconstituted itself on the old framework after every shock ; and this kind
of vitality, unknown to. the ordinary Oriental monarchy, always betokens
rooted habits of self-government, associated with considerable liberty of
local administration. " This framework," 'MM. Perrot and Chipiez
observe, " had been so patiently elaborated and co-ordinated, it was so
elastic, and at the same time so full of resistance, that even a foreign
master found it more politic to preserve it and fall in with its ways than to
destroy it ; he was content in most cases to step into the place occupied
by the prince he ousted. Affairs then fell into their accustomed groove,
as soon as a conquest was complete ; classes were reconstituted on their
old bases ; property and people took up their former conditions ; the only
difference lay in the fact that a new group of privileged individuals shared
the wealth created by agricultural, industrial, and commercial activity.
The sovereign and his chief officers might be of foreign race, but the social
machine rolled on over the same road and with the same wheels as
before." 3

1 This idea is brought out in some cases more clearly by P. Jensen than Amiaud, e.g.
in Gudea D., col. 2, 1. 4-6. " . . . A righteous man, who loves his town, fulfilling
what it is becoming for him to do," I.e., p. 51.

2 Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, p. 264.

3 Vol. ii. p. 379, Eng. tr. A somewhat similar, if less fortunate, result maybe ob-
served in the Hibernization of successive invaders of Ireland.

246 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

These remarks apply even more fully to the early history of Southern
Mesopotamia than could have been realized when they were written.
Elamite, Semitic, and Kassite princes might establish dynasties, but the
culture of the subject population was too strong for them, and like Sargon
and Cyrus they were content to serve as its military protectors or guardians.
Conquerors who asked for more than this got nothing, for their conquests
crumbled away like sun-dried bricks. Chaldaean civilization, like that of
Egypt, had to exist in its own way or perish utterly. China, not un-
wisely, takes the same view of her own destiny, and this general resem-
blance adds to the interest of the parallel institutions met with in all three
countries.

Some of the earliest inscriptions found at Telloh, those of the kings
Ur-nina and Ur-kagina and the patesi En-anna-tumma, speak of " the
house of fruits " of divers gods. The first of these princes tells us that
after erecting the temple of Ningirsu, he caused seventy great measures (?)
of corn to be stored up in his house of fruits, and the second enumerates
among his constructions " the house of fruits which produces abundance
(?) in the country;" while the third restored the house of fruits of the god
Ningirsu, possibly the one erected by Ur-nina.1 Many of the private
tablets now in the British Museum record or acknowledge the loans of
grain made from temples, and it is clear that from the earliest times it was
the custom for the prince to give corn to the temples, and for the temples
to give or lend it to the cultivators in their need ; in other words, the
temple revenues served the same purpose as the stores of grain, which it
was considered the duty of a Chinese prince to accumulate during years of
plenty, or those with which Egyptian kings and princes provided rations
for the workmen employed upon their monuments, or for the cultivators
whose crops have failed.

The passage ia which Sargon speaks of fixing the price of corn and oil,2
for the benefit of his subjects, shows that the liberty of traders was re-
stricted, not in any way for fiscal purposes, but to prevent an unwholesome
scarcity or dearness of the necessaries of life. The "dishes of the kings
and the gods " are referred to as furnishing a certain standard of propriety,
and it is a reasonable inference that the desired cheapness was secured,
after the Chinese method, by regulated issues from the house of fruits, and
that it was in this way that " abundance was produced in the country."

This institution is clearly distinct from the offerings or endowments
devoted to the worship of the temple. The former were on a modest
scale, which shows that anciently the maintenance of the priesthood
cannot have been a burdensome charge. For the great festival of the
goddess Bau, at the beginning of the year, one ox, ten sheep of various
kinds,3 two lambs, seven measures of dates, seven measures of cream,

1 Records, N.S., i. pp. 68,71, 74. Jensen reads doubtfully, " das Nahrungshaus. "
{Keilinschriflliche Bibliothek, iii. I, 19.)
a Post, p. 308.
3 An adjective is appended to each animal mentioned, which Amiaud conjectural!/

SUMERIAN CIVILIZATION. 247

seven palm shoots, two other articles by the seven, seven swans, fifteen
cranes, fifteen eggs of one animal and thirty of another, thirty garments of
wool, and seven garments of some other material were presented, and
these gifts were only doubled at the dedication of a new temple. The
numbers fifteen and thirty are interesting, and give a presumption in favour
of the sexagesimal notation having been adopted already ; seven we know
to have been a favourite number, and fourteen occurs occasionally, but
fifteen is much more common, and there can have been no reason to
prefer it to the more obvious multiple of seven, unless it were a fraction of
some number even more notable. The matter is placed beyond a doubt
by a list of garments, in archaic characters,1 discovered and published by
the Pennsylvania!! University expedition, to which attention has been
called by P. Jensen. A number of items make up the total ninety-two,
which is written, rudely, thus : &**&& i.e. 60 + 30 + 2.

An endowment, as distinct from offerings, is described in the same
inscription : 2 " Gudea in a pure place has built the temple of the goddess
Gatumdug, his lady ; he has made the holy throne of her divinity, and
her sacred altar (?). He has formed the oxen into a herd, and established
their herdsman ; to the sacred cows he has added sacred calves, and
established their drover. To the sacred sheep he has added sacred lambs,
and has established their shepherd. To the sacred goats he has added
sacred kids ; their goatherd he has established. To the dams of whatever
species the increase of younglings, he has added and established their
guardian." The reiterated assurances on this head seem to imply that it
was something new to give herds for breeding to the temples, and we may
infer that, at least until this time, each generation provided gifts for its
own sacrifices at its own expense. As in Egypt, permanent endowments
were invented by potentates who wished to perpetuate after their death
the precise worship in which they took most interest while alive. It was
for their own satisfaction rather than that of the gods that such gifts were
made ; and as, naturally, the kings only devoted their superfluities to this
posthumous satisfaction, the people of the country were not burdened, and
as in Egypt the national religion was associated with popular shows rather
than oppressive contributions.

If the king's storehouses were intended for the glory of the god and the
good of the people, and the temples for the glory of the king and the
satisfaction of the gods, the third great kind of public work carried on by
all the leading princes was inspired exclusively by regard for the well
being of the people. From Ur-kagina 3 to Nebuchadnezzar, the construc-
tion of canals and their reparation was a constant care of the great kings ;

venders "young," " fat," and " male ;" they might, however, represent technical varieties
of form or colour, considered important for sacrificial purposes.

1 Hilprecht (Babylonian Expedition, PI. 6). Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie> Aug.
1893, p. 231.

a On statue E of the Louvre. Records, N.S., ii. p. 99.

3 Records, N.S., i. 72.

248 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

the " canal in the street," when untroubled by the powers of evil, supplied
the citizens with water as well as with the means of communication, where
roads would have been impassable when the floods were out.

The head or mouth of a canal was a favourite place for temples or
monuments, of the kind culminating in the Egyptian Labyrinth, and even
the early Sirgulla monuments are supposed to name buildings after the
quays of the canals. The entirely artificial character of these channels is
shown by the fact that they were lined with tiles, and apparently sometimes
paved as well as walled.1 They easily fell out of repair, and the inhabit-
ants, in the words of Senacherib, finding nothing to drink, lifted up their
eyes after the rain, the offspring of the skies. One king frequently records
of another, "The canal which he had dug, its head was destroyed, and
for so many years the water within it did not run ;" or "its course had
become choked with fallen earth ; " then the restorer digs it over again,
brings the water into its bed, tiles its walls, makes bridges across it, and
plants trees along its side.

The constant mention of " foundations " as an essential part of all
buildings is a witness to the difficulty of giving permanence to any kind of
erection. " His head in his foundations " is the equivalent expression for
"upside down;" and an Akkadian proverb describes the condition of
success in the law courts : " A heap of witnesses as his foundations he
has made strong."2 In the case of buildings of importance, like a city
gate, the foundations were excavated till water was reached,3 and tiles set
in bitumen substituted for the soil. The mounds on which the walls were
to be raised, if of earth or crude brick, were themselves carefully drained
with terra-cotta pipes, tapering in three circles at the points, and perfor-
ated with small holes to carry off the water, without allowing the pipe to
become clogged with earth. " The House of the seven divisions of Heaven
and Earth," the famous seven-staged tower of Borsippa, was found by
Nebuchadnezzar to have fallen into decay, in consequence of the channels
for water having got out of order, so that the coating of tiles was broken
through.

The burnt bricks of Chaldsea were practically indestructible, but, un-
fortunately, those dried in the sun lasted long enough to encourage their
use. The heat of the climate made thick walls desirable, and as timber
and stone were scarce, it was easier to roof over chambers which were
small in proportion to the size of the enclosing walls. On the other hand,
the great weight of such walls, unless the foundations had received excep-
tional attention, caused the fabrics to subside easily into mere earth heaps,
even when they had been originally faced with kiln-made bricks or tiles.
The more lofty the building, the more rapidly it was likely to fall into
ruins : and hence, as MM. Perrot and Chipiez observe, Mesopotamia differs

1 Like the water channel in the island of Bahrein, inf. Book III. ch. viii.

2 Records of the Past, vol. xi. p. 153.

3 Schrader, K.B., iii. 2, pp. 21, 5. An inscription of Sargon (il>., ii. 71) speaks of this
occurring, in the digging of a canal, at the depth of 21 ells.

SUM BRIAN CIVILIZATION. 249

from Egypt in the fact that its palaces remain while the temples have dis-
appeared.

The bas-reliefs with which the interior walls of the palaces were decor-
ated, were executed in a soft, easily worked alabaster, and served as a
kind of dado to protect the crude brick walls. The Assyrian kings some-
times annexed the panels of their predecessors, turning their carvings and
inscriptions to the wall, and using the blank surface to commemorate their
own achievements. Esarhaddon was particularly addicted to this kind of
theft, the palace of Tiglath-Pileser II. being despoiled for his benefit,
though he boasts in one inscription of repeating the lines with the name
and titles of his father along with his own, and adjures his descendants to
show equal piety towards himself, to purify his inscriptions with oil, and
bring offerings before them that so Assur and Istar may hear their own
prayers.

The inscriptions of the kings bear repeated witness to the ease with
which cities were destroyed, as well as to the readiness with which works
of all kinds fell into decay. The destruction of Babylon, which Esarhad-
don ascribes ambiguously to a " former king," swept over its dwelling-
places and temples and made them as a ploughed field, so that its habit-
ableness was destroyed for eleven years. Reducing the towns of an enemy
to the condition of a ploughed field was, in fact, the easiest and most
common form of vengeance. The canal banks fell in, the channels silted
up, the floods penetrated the foundations and washed down the walls of
houses and temples, and even if the destroyed buildings were so large and
numerous as to form a mound upon the plain, these mounds themselves
were cultivated and built upon, like virgin soil. The short interval
between the fall of Nineveh and the Retreat of the Ten Thousand sufficed
for the great city to vanish so entirely, that Xenophon passed by its site
without suspicion of its former history; and at the present day the fields
and cottages of an Arab village are most commonly planted on the top of
the mounds formed by buried cities.

Of decorative architecture, that is to say of buildings deliberately made
beautiful in lines and proportions, there was little or none in Babylonia
and Assyria. The conjectural restorations of the ancient buildings show
great masses of unrelieved brick wall, varying little in main outline from
the mastaba form of tomb. The colossal winged bulls which formed the
only ornament of the facade, needed all their size not to be dwarfed by
the mass, and they were set up probably less for ornament than symbolism.
The antiquarian Nabonidus doubtless expressed the current tradition when
he tells us that he set up for the protection of the sanctuary of a temple
" a wild bull of shining bronze, who pushes back my foes ; " 1 and a cor-
responding meaning must have been attached to the serpents also por-
trayed, especially at gateways. The quaint device of representing bulls
and lions with five legs is not in practice so ludicrous as might have been
expected ; on a front view, two front legs are shown in a standing position,

1 K. B., iii. 2, p. 101.

250 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

and at the side four legs are shown walking, but there is scarcely any point
from which all five legs are seen at once.1

What has been said above with regard to animal worship in Egypt
applies to the beast-headed gods of Babylonia. The story of the loves
of the goddess Istar, — with the eagle, Alala, the lion, perfect in might,
the horse, glorious in battle, as well as with the shepherd, Tabulu, and
Isullanu (he who makes green the living things), the gardener of her
father, — would show this sufficiently, while also explaining the place of
such representations in the national art. But the early hymns abound in
indications of the sense of nearness to the animal world. A hymn to
Ea, the god of the pure crown, prays, " May all creatures that have wings
and fins be strong!"2 and the half natural, half superstitious loathing of
the hyaena and other ravagers of the sheepfold is curiously like that with
which the Australian stockman regards the dingo.

The earliest buildings possess as much ornamentation as any ; at
Warka, the ancient Erech, a wall was found made of terra-cotta cones,
with stained base forming mosaic, and another decoration was formed
by letting in empty vases, with their mouth flush to the wall. Blue,
yellow, black and white are the colours chiefly found in enamelled
bricks,-' and the manufacture of fine enamelled tiles, which continued down
to the beginning of the present century in Nicaea and Nicomedia, may
represent an unbroken tradition derived from the earliest occupation of
these districts, as the so-called Turkey and Persian carpets, which are
admirable in direct proportion to their freedom from European influence,
are the lineal descendants of the Babylonish wares, which Semitic and
Aryan nations agreed in regarding as the supreme type of luxury. The
workmen of Mesopotamia do not seem to have possessed any exceptional
mechanical skill. The knowledge and use of the arch is naturally most
common among builders using the smallest units of construction, and they
had a curious plan of laying each course of the bricks of the arch on a
slant, so as to rest more easily in place ; 4 but it seems doubtful if the
principle of the arch was really understood, at least in Assyria, as the
vaulted roof in Sargon's palace at Khorsabad is made of bricks each
shaped for its place in the dome. Scented cedar wood was used for the
internal fittings of temples and palaces, and beaten gold and bronze work
were used to cover the wood.

As already observed, iron of the best quality was produced, and the art
of damascening was understood. During the American excavations at
Nipur, agate was found in plenty ; magnesite was still more abundant,
and said to be of extraordinary purity, such as is only met with in Eubcea ;
while real and artificial lapis lazuli — the latter a glass coloured with cobalt
—were the most plentiful of all : thirty to thirty-five (German) pounds'
weight were found in all. Inscribed blocks or disks of lapis lazuli were
the favourite offering of Kassite kings, and its identification with the ugnu

1 Art in Chaldaa, ii. 131. 2 Hib. Lee., p. 140. 3 Art in Chaldim, i. 283.
4 lb., p. 230, and illustration.

SUMERIAN CIVILIZATION. 251

or nknu stone frequently named among the gifts of Burnaburias in the
Tell el Amarna tablets is now regarded as certain.1 The existence of
the thin plates of this valuable material is accounted for by Hilprecht as
follows : inscribed blocks were originally dedicated by the kings, and
preserved in the temples, but after a time the priestly custodians of the
blocks considered themselves at liberty to slice off the inscription and use
the remainder of the stone, a device not guarded against in the impreca-
tions to which the donors trusted for the preservation of their monuments.
Sometimes, notwithstanding the imprecations, the inscription was scratched
out.

Upon the whole the industrial arts in primitive Babylonia were in a state
of development compatible with quite rudimentary civilization, or even the
higher forms of barbarism. Taste and dexterity are often at their best
before social or political organization ; and the importance of the manu-
factures of Mesopotamia lay in the fact that a populous and well-ordered
country, inhabited by eager and able traders, could produce, in any quan-
tity that might be desired, all such wares as are now generally supplied,
only on a small scale, by backward races, whose work is done in accord-
ance with ancient custom rather than from choice with commercial intent.

1 Z.A., viii. 2, pp. 187, 232.

CHAPTER II.

BABYLONIAN CHRONOLOGY.

DISCOVERIES made within the last decade have led the students of the
earliest monuments of Babylonia to claim for the kingdoms of Sumer and
Akkad an earlier date than even that assigned for the foundation of the
Egyptian monarchy. Indeed, it is clear that Euphratic civilization must
have been the elder, if the ancestors of the Egyptians proceeded from
Western Asia to the Nile Valley, and if the civilization established in the
region they quitted was not brought back by a returning stream of immi-
gration from Egypt.

To the general resemblances noted in the earliest monuments of Egypt
and Babylonia, Professor Hommel has lately added a remarkable list of
coincidences of name and meaning in some of the most ancient divinities
and towns of the two countries. Eridu, the seat of the primaeval worship
of Ea, in its earliest form Urru- (or Gurru-) dugga, means "city of the good"
(sc. god), while the name of Memphis (Men-nofer), commonly rendered
"good city," is susceptible of the same reading as that of Eridu.1 At
some still earlier period Eridu is called Nun-ki, the place of Nun, the god
of the heavenly ocean, which it is possible further to identify with the later
name of the god Anu, on the one hand, and with the Egyptian Nun on
the other. The primitive cosmogony of Egypt and Babylonia follow
parallel lines,, and besides the natural deities of water, air, and earth, who
might be recognised and duplicated independently, the place of Merodach,
the son and manifestation of the Good Being, is singularly similar to that
of Osiris, the interpretation of whose name may be revised in the same
direction as that of Memphis, so as to convert the resemblance into
identity.

There is only one certain way to test the correctness of the interpreta-
tion of a doubtful hieroglyph ; namely, to trace each element in the
hieroglyph back to an original ideogram. This had not been done m
Egyptian for the name Osiris, which is made up (in pyramid texts) of the
groups "dwelling" and "eye," is read us-ir, and has no assignable mean-
ing. In the earliest Sumerian texts the name of Merodach is also written
with the ideograms for "dwelling" and "eye," but the latter character has
also the sound value timma, which, whether originally used for eye or not,
is also used for the ram, the symbol of Ea, so that the Sumerian characters

1 Der Babylonische Ursprung der Atgyptischen Kultiir. Munich, 1892, p. 23.

BABYLONIAN CHRONOLOGY. 253

bear on their face the sense "dwelling place of Ea," and the source of the
Egyptian hieroglyph, in sounds which once signified " dwelling-place (i.e.
manifestation or embodiment) of the god," is thus fairly demonstrated.1

Other parallelisms, not perhaps equally striking, or all equally convinc-
ing, are discussed in the same publication ; but as one sufficient proof is
not invalidated by any number of weaker ones, it seems hardly possible to
challenge the inference of the learned Assyriologist that the names Osiris
.and Memphis, like the structure of the seven-staged step pyramids of pre-
historic Egypt, form part of the inheritance received by the Egyptians
from the parentage they shared with the men of Eridu. The only bearing
of this fact on the history of Babylonia is to throw the date of its begin-
nings at least some centuries further back than whatever date is assigned
to Menes. The final history of Babylonia will not be written for many
years to come, and may remain fragmentary even when every mound has
been rifled of its contents, and every text translated. But the existence
of ancient kings of Agade, and still more ancient priests regent at Lagash,
and of a succession of princes ruling at Ur, Erech, Larsa, Sippara, and
other cities more venerable than Babel itself, is a fact as certain as the
exact date and sequence of the kings is doubtful. The general order of
the monuments can also be approximately assigned from internal and
other evidence, and all that is most characteristic in the national tempera-
ment can be traced to the earliest period ; at least the traces of what is
most peculiar to the people are relatively most numerous at the earliest
date, and so warrant the inference that these traits are aboriginal.

In Egypt the kings of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty effected a sort of anti-
quarian Renaissance. They restored the worship and the monuments of
ancient kings as far back as the Second and Third Dynasties. Nabonidus,
king of Babylon (550 B.C.), seems to have had a similar ambition, and an
inscription of his furnishes the cornerstone of recent systems of Babylonian
chronology. In this he narrates how he rebuilt a temple of Samas, erected
forty-five years before by Nebuchadnezzar, who had vainly sought for the
foundation stone of the ancient temple he replaced. Nebuchadnezzar's
temple fell into decay, and Nabonidus, before restoring it, made more
searching excavations and laid bare the foundation stone of Naram-Sin,
the son of Sargon, " which no living king before me," says Nabonidus,
"had seen for 3,200 years."2 If Nabonidus' chronological information
was correct, this gives a date for Sargon of Agade about 3800 B.C., very
much prior to any time suggested for that ruler before the discovery of
the inscription. The argument for accepting the date is that other kings
refer to events that occurred several centuries ago, such as the capture of
sacred images, in a way that shows the national chronicles to have been
continuously dated, as well as candid and complete.

Senacherib boasts that at his conquest of Babylon, in 695 B.C., he re-

1 lc., p. 21 ff. Cf. also the independent suggestion of Rev. C. J. Ball, P.S.B.A.,
iSao^pp. 401, 2.

2 K.B., iii. 2, 105. The original cylinder found at Sippara is published, Rawlinson,
II'. A. I., v. 64.

254 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

covered two Assyrian gods which had been carried off by Marduknadinahi
418 years before.1 Marduknadinahi was a contemporary of Tiglath-Pileser
I., and the latter speaks of restoring a temple of Assur, built 700 years
before by the king Samsi-rarriman I., who therefore reigned about 1814 B.c.2
Nabonidus elsewhere refers to an interval of 700 years between two earlier
rulers : the famous Hammurabi and Burnaburias, the correspondent of
Amenophis III.3 On another occasion Senacherib speaks of having re-
claimed a seal belonging to the Assyrian conqueror of Babylon, Tiglat-
adar, which had been carried off into the land of Akkad 600 years before,
and so fixes the date of the war in question to the thirteenth century

B.C.4

A still longer interval is bridged by the statement of Assurbanipal that
when he conquered Elam, about 650 B.C., he found there an image of the
goddess Nana, which the Elamite conqueror Kudurnanchundi had carried
off 1,635 years before, i.e. 2285 B.C.5 Records of this kind inspire con-
fidence, because a modern conqueror has no motive to invent a remote
defeat of his predecessors, though he will not suppress a contemporary
record of such a defeat, when its capture bears witness to the completeness
with which the tables have been turned in his favour. It is probable that
Elamite and Kassite, as well as Assyrian and Babylonian kings, kept re-
cords of their relations with adjoining powers, which may have been at all
times more or less accessible to the learned, besides being used officially
in diplomatic negotiations. The long period, of which Assurbanipal speaks,
is described after the ancient Babylonian fashion as 2 ners, 7 sosses and
15 (i.e. 1200 + 420+ 15), or 1,635 years, and the date thus assigned to
the Elamite king does not present any special difficulty.

It may be asked why, if the chronology of Assurbanipal is accepted for
events 1,600 years before his own date, we need hesitate to accept the
chronology of Nabonidus for twice that period. His evidence is con-
clusive as to the fact that he restored a building, erected by Naram-Sin,G
and that the chroniclers of the sixth century B.C. informed him that this
king reigned three times one number, plus twice another number, of years

1 K. B., ii. 119.

2 Ib., i. 43. Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte. C. P. Tiele. Part i. pp. 93, 4.
:! K.B., iii. 2, 91!

4 Ib., i. ii.

5 Ib., ii. 209. Such reciprocal capturing of inscribed monuments went on from very
early times. Two interesting examples oHt were discovered by the Babylonian Expedi-
tion of the University of Pennsylvania (ed. by Hilprecht), vol. i. pt. I (1893), pp. 21,
31. A tablet of agate dedicated " for the life of Dungi " by a patesi, and carried off by
some conquerors to Elam, was recovered by Kurigalzu, king of Kardunias, when he
conquered the palace of Susa in Elam, and re-dedicated "to Belit, his mistress, for her
life." And on the other hand, a new, early Semitic king, Alusharshid, records how he
carried off costly marble vases, and presented them to Bel from the spoil of Elam when
he had subjugated Elam and Bara' se.

6 Besides vases and a cylinder bearing the name of Naram-Sin previously known, the
American expedition discovered two brick stamps of Naram-Sin, on which he was called
builder of the temple of Bel. They were found (I.e., p. 18) close to an inscription of
Ente (men) na, a patesi of Lagash.

BABYLONIAN CHRONOLOGY. 255

The opinion of learned Babylonians of that period concerning the early
chronology of the country is no doubt deserving of respectful attention,
but however much the wisdom of the Chaldees may have exceeded that
of the rest of the world, we can scarcely believe that they conceived, a
priori, the idea of a continuous chronological history of the whole country,
while its cities were still in turn the capitals of rival or independent States,
and no central power had reigned long enough to appropriate, as it were,
the antiquities of its dependents. Astronomical records of a sort were
doubtless kept from a very early time, and it is probable that inscriptions
recording the victories and buildings of the kings were preserved in
duplicate in public record offices.

But this by itself is not enough : the materials for history were preserved
in ancient China by the- institution of responsible historiographers, yet it
was reserved for Ssema-tsien, a writer of the Han dynasty, to make out a
chronology for the ancient monarchy, over 2,000 years after its history
began. While time is measured by the reigns of kings or yearly eponyms
on the one hand, and by astronomical periods on the other, it is almost
certain that discrepancies will show themselves in the record, which after a
time can only be dealt with by conjectural emendations ; so that it is at
least as likely as not, that the date given by Nabonidus was fixed by the
imaginative learning of a Babylonian Ssema-tsien or Archbishop Ussher,
rather than by really contemporary records.

The foundation stone which Nabonidus saw certainly bore no date, and
until we know something more about the historical resources available from
the eighth to the sixth century B.C., we must look upon such statements
as possessing a totally different kind of value from that pertaining to the
undated original monuments. It is notable also that Nabonidus counts by
thousands and hundreds instead of by ners and sosses as Assurbanipal did,
and as all really ancient Babylonian texts would have done.

The method of writing was the same for the decimal and the sexagesimal
notation, the sosses, ners, and sars being distinguished by their place, exactly
as tens, hundreds, and thousands are in the Arabic notation. Only a small
single stroke marks the difference between the soss and the hundred, and
the ner and the thousand ; it would therefore be easy at any time for an
ignorant or careless scribe, familiar with the decimal notation common to
the Semitic nationalities, to copy 3 ners, 2 sosses as 3,200; while a careful
one would be more likely to copy the former reckoning verbatim than to
reduce it to a decimal expression by writing i92o.1 If the correct date of
Sargon was known, and that assigned by Nabonidus is too early, this is,
to say the least of it, a possible explanation of the error; and on this
hypothesis the date of his son would be about 2470 B.C. instead of 3750;
or shortly before the close of the first Chaldean dynasty of Berosus,

1 The soss is 60 and the ner 600 : the square of a soss is a sar (3,600). One text of
Assurbanipal's inscription gives 1,535 years instead of 1,635, but the correctness of the
latter figure is proved by its correspondence with the time as described in ners and sosses.
The mistake shows that Babylonian scribes might go wrong in transcribing figures.

256

ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

according to the rearrangement of his fragments, proposed by von Gut-
schmid.1

It is certain in any case that the chronology of Nabonidus resembled
this list in the essential particular of including a period of about 2,000
years for which the numbers and duration of the kings' reigns are quite
credible and natural, the average for 1,920 years being at about the rate
of seven reigns to a century ; while the duration of the preceding long
mythical period has all the appearance of being fixed so as to make up an
even number of sars, when added to the historical period.

Aristotle is said to have received from Kallisthenes observations made
in Babylon as far back as 2234 B.C.,2 that is about the end of the first
historical dynasty in the preceding list, and the character of the monu-
ments which are certainly earlier than Sargon is not such as to make it
probable that their authors had yet arrived at the idea of writing history
with dates. Comparatively modern kings are still content with such
indications of time as are afforded by the well-known incidents of each
reign, as if we dated all events, as we do some, e.g. the year of the Great
Exhibition, of the Crimean war, the taking of Sebastopol, or the Indian
Mutiny ; and it may well be that when chronology was young, the years in
which nothing very noteworthy happened, dropped out of the record, as
the reigns of kings, who left no inscribed monuments, were apt to do in
Egypt. The legendary importance of Sargon harmonises better with his
position at the beginning of the period of historical records (circ. 2500
B.C.) than with the earlier date, according to which he would be separated
by something like 1,500 years from the beginnings of history known to
Assurbanipal, Berosus, and Aristotle. The appearance of his name and that
of his son upon cylinders and other objects proves him to have been an
historical personage, while the scantiness of his monuments is not sur-
prising if he was the virtual founder of an important kingdom in Northern
Babylonia. Two perfect brick stamps, a portion of a third, and three door
sockets, bearing the name of Sharganisharali, which Hilprecht, Hommel,
Sayce, and Tiele agree in reading " Sargon, king of the city," 3 were found
by the Pennsylvania!! expedition. The former call him " King of Agade,
builder of the temple of Bel," and one of the latter gives the name of his

1 The list of the dynasties following the Flood as thus reconstructed is as follows : —

isi uyn
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
6th
7th
8th

siy ou v^iiiiiuiccui i\i
8 Median
ii [Chaldaean
49 Chaldosan
9 Arabian
45 [Assyrian?]
8
Chaldrean

1^3 ICli^

ts JTJ yet
224 '
258]
458

245

526

122]
[87]

J5.1

om 2458 t
2234 ,
1976 ,
1518 ,
1273 ,
747 ,
625 ,

32234
1976
1518
1273
747
625

538

Total, 36,000 years, or 10 sars.
Ten kings before the Deluge are set down as reigning 432,000 years, or 120 sars.

2 Other versions give the date 2231, 2243, an^ 2286 B.C., a variation in all of little
more than half a century. (Records of the Past, N.S., vol. i. p. n.)

3 Hilprecht, I.e., p. 15. Oppert, Menant, and Winckler suppose the whole title to
form one name.

BABYLONIAN CHRONOLOGY. 257

father, without the title of king, so that in the Semitic sense he might be
regarded as a son of nobody, i.e. the founder of a dynasty. The in-
scription runs : " Sargon, king of the city, son of Itti-bel, the mighty king,
king of Agade and of the dominions (?) of Bel, builder of Ekur, temple of
Bel in Nipur."

If an historical hero and a legendary hero bear the same name, the
most obvious supposition is that the legends gathered round the historical
memory, and there seems at present no reason to seek for any other
hypothesis in the case of Sargon. The mythical age of the Assyrian
monarchy is contemporary with a period of Babylonian history illustrated
by tolerably abundant contemporary inscriptions, and the kingdom of
Sargon occupies an intermediate place between ancient Assyria and the
primitive kingdoms and priestdoms of Sumer and Akkad.

History begins with the records of these latter rulers, and the only
reason for giving precedence to the discussion of Sargon's date is that they
are earlier than he, but otherwise undated. Their relative order may be
fixed approximately by internal evidence and comparison ; but if we yield
implicit credit to the tablet of Nabonidus, we must suppose all the oldest
monuments to be earlier than 3700 B.C. ; while if the date there given was
conjectural or based upon a confusion of sosses and centuries, they will
only be proved in round numbers to be older than 2500 B.C. Provision-
ally, perhaps, it may be as well to entertain the latter hypothesis.

Hommel, who, like the majority of Assyriologists, accepts the earlier
date, supposes the oldest specimens of Babylonian art to be about 1,200
years older than Sargon, and therefore to date from about 5000 B.C. The
same interval calculated from the later date brings us to 3800 B.C. for
the beginnings of Babylonian civilization ; so that if we adopt alike for
Babylonia and Egypt the shortest estimates of time possible in each case,
we shall still find Babylonian civilization apparently the earlier of the
two. The art, however, of the earliest Egyptian monuments is to the
full as advanced as that of contemporary Babylonia, so that we are no
more entitled to derive Egyptian civilization from the Euphrates than
Babylonian civilization from the Nile. For the present all detailed results
must be regarded as provisional, and the laity may be content to know, in
general terms, that there are fragmentary materials for Babylonian history
for 2,000 years or more before the age of continuous record-keeping
begins, in the twenty-third century B.C.

For the period after that date, two lists of Babylonian kings, arranged in
dynasties, have been found, which agree with one another in the passages
that survive, and may quite possibly represent a version of the same original
as that followed by Berosus.1 There are still many doubtful questions as
to the date of the various dynasties and the extent to which they may
overlap, and it has been argued that the object of a third bi-lingual list was
only to give the translation of the kings' names, and that therefore they
may not have been named there in strict chronological order.

1 Hommel, Vor-Semitischen Kulturen, p. 333. Records, N.S.,i. I3ff. K.B., ii. 286 ff.

P.C. S

258 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

The most perfect of the two tables gives eleven kings of the first
dynasty of Babylon, reigning 304 years ; eleven kings of a dynasty of
Siskn, reigning 368 years ; then thirty-six kings of a Kassite dynasty,
reigning 576 years (of these only half the names are preserved), the
latter of whom appear identical with princes mentioned in the synchronous
history of Babylonia and Assyria. The next dynasty is called that of Pasi,
to which eleven kings, reigning 72 years, belonged. The names of all
these kings were compounded with that of either the god Nebo or
Merodach, and the Assyrian contemporaries of some of them are known.
The next three short-lived dynasties included seven kings reigning in all
47 years. Then follows a dynasty of kings of Babel, their number and the
duration of their reigns being uncertain ; or else two dynasties, one of
Babel lasting 31 years, and one before it, lasting ten or eleven reigns, and
an uncertain number of years, ending B.C. 732. l

If the two tables are compared, there appears to be a discrepancy
between the two totals of about 300 years, against which we have ten or
twelve kings who must have filled the vacant space in one column of the
list. Of course the Babylonian list takes no account of the forty-five Assyrian
kings of Berosus, who were the ruling dynasty in Mesopotamia during the
time allotted ; but if they and the minor dynasties contemporary with them
are omitted, the first four historical dynasties of Berosus give eighty kings
reigning 1,175 years, while the three first dynasties of the Babylonian list
give fifty-eight kings reigning 1,248 years. The average of Berosus is thus
nearly seven reigns to a century, and that of the list nearly five : both are
historically possible, but the average of Berosus is reached by putting
together thirty-one kings of three different dynasties who reign 717 years,
or on an average 23 years each, and forty-nine kings of Chaldaea
who reign 458 years, or an average of 9 years each, and that at a
period when the national records do not show a particularly rapid or
disturbed succession. It may therefore be conjectured that the third
historic dynasty of Berosus includes some contemporary Chaldaean
dynasties, and that the period covered by the two lists does not go much
further back than 2200-2300 B.C., or between two and three hundred years
after the latest date that can be suggested for Sargon.
. It will be remembered that the date 2285 B.C. is given by Assurbanipal
for the successful invasion of Chaldsea by an Elamite king, Kudurnan-
chundi, and the inscriptions of that period include several by kings with
Elamite names. Hommel proposes to transpose the two first dynasties on
the Babylonian list, so as to make the Sisku kings correspond to the Median
dynasty of Berosus, as otherwise the Elamite invasion falls in the reign of
the famous and flourishing King Hammurabi (or Chammuragash), whose
father it is desired to identify with Amraphel, the contemporary of
Abraham. Kudur Lagamar, the Elamite king contemporary with the
patriarch, being also named, Kudurnanchundi, the king of the inscriptions,

1 Hommel (Geschichte, p. 173) gives good reason for supposing it to begin about
1034 B.C.

BABYLONIAN CHRONOLOGY. 259,

coull not have reigned at the same time. This, however, is to lay rather
too much stress upon the chronological accuracy of the book of Genesis..
The identification of Chedorlaomer with the Elamite king need not be
questioned, but it is more probable that the Hebrew editors of the-
Pentateuch learnt their ancient history from Babylon than that they.
carried about with them, through all their wanderings, a correct tradition
as to the kings of Mesopotamia at a single distant period. And if so> we
cannot revise the Babylonian records to suit a text presumably based upon,
them.

There is nothing irreconcilable in the conjunction of an Elamite
invasion of the territory of Erech with the rule of a powerful sovereign
in Babel ; and there is nothing inconsistent with the rule of Hammurabi
in the appellation of Median given to the first historical dynasty by
Berosus. That king and his father ruled in Babylon, but their names are
not Sumerian, most probably Kassite, and Kassite rulers might be mis-
called Median as readily as the kings of the Sisku dynasty, whose names
are also foreign. In any case the long reign of Hammurabi and the
advanced civilization to which the deeds of his time bear witness, cannot
belong to a later period than 1923-1868 B.C., and may be as early,, if we
follow the Babylonian list, as 2291-2236 B.C. It is in favour of the earlier
date that the style of the contract tablets of Gamil-Sin and the early kings
of Larsa is similar to that of Hammurabi.1

The reigns of Hammurabi and his son together cover ninety years.
Four other reigns follow, sons succeeding their fathers and reigning
together for ninety-two, probably peaceful, years, down to the twenty-
second century B.C. Contract tablets from two out of the four reigns
survive. From about 2100 to 1732 B.C., according to the Babylonian list,
power was in the hands of the so-called dynasty of Sisku, of which we
know practically nothing, except that some kings reigning during the
period are probably omitted from the list. In a bi-lingual list, which
gives the Semitic translation of Sumerian and Kassite kings' names, the
names of the fourth, sixth, eighth, and ninth kings of the Sisku dynasty are
given successively ; but then, instead of the last two names of the dynasty
— one of which at least called for translation — two additional names appear,
a king, Lugal-gi-rin-na, or Sargon (commonly called Sargon II., since
Sargori of Agade has been thrown two thousand years earlier), and a queen
Azag-bau.

In the bi-lingual list these names are followed by that of Hammurabi and
the last king but one of his dynasty, and then by several Kassite kings'
names, and this order is one reason why Hommel makes the dynasty of
Hammurabi come second. The surviving portion of the list, however,
begins with four names not belonging to either of the early dynasties, and
it is therefore difficult to treat it as an historical authority.

The duration of the Second Dynasty is given as 368 years, and as only

1 For convenience of reference, a chronological table is subjoined (Appendix D), con-
taining all the names and dates of the kings that are known or conjectured.

26o ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

eleven kings are assigned to it, that gives the rather incredible average
of 33! years for each reign : four of the reigns are of fifty years and
upwards, and though this is not physically impossible, it is so far from
probable that any direct evidence against either the length of the reigns
or of the dynasty should be accepted. It is possible that when father
and son reign respectively fifty and fifty-five years, the son was associated
with his father during a part of the fifty, as Rim-Sin certainly was with
Kudur-tnabug, and in that case the total of 368 would be an inferential
addition by some not too well-informed scribe. It is also possible that
the dynasty included eleven legitimate and acknowledged kings, and that
an interval of disorder, preceding the establishment of the next dynasty,
was included in the 368 years if that period was fixed independently.

The next or third dynasty on the list, of which the name is illegible,
included thirty-six kings reigning on an average sixteen years, so that there
is no reason to suppose this to have begun later than about 1730 B.C.
Before its close we begin to catch glimpses of the history of nations,
instead of only a broken record of strange names.

CHAPTER III.

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD.

IN one of the Babylonian accounts of the creation, the beginning of all
things is represented as the time before temples, trees, houses, and
cities had been made : Nipur had not been built, Ekura had not been
constructed ; Erech had not been built, Eana had not been constructed ;
the Abyss had not been made, Eridu had not been constructed.1 These
three cities, with their temples, were named from of old before Babylon
and Esagilla its great temple, called after that of Eridu. The oldest
monuments, which have been found, are also plainly derived from a period
when tradition can have known no greater events than the foundation of
such cities.

The oldest specimens of Babylonian art consist of cylinders, without
writing, engraved with spirited but quite barbaric animal figures : one
cylinder, belonging to the patesi or priest king of a city, the name of which
is uncertain, has been conjecturally attributed to the fifth, or fourth,
millennium B.C. The earliest formulas of conjuration are also attributed to
this almost prehistoric age,2 after which there are still three periods of
archaism distinguished, to each of which inscriptions belong. The
earliest of these includes the records of the earliest known king of Lagash,
one Ur-ghan or Ur-nina, say 4500 or 3300 B.C. Ghanna, which appears
as an element in this name, signifies " fish." The king's fragmentary bas-
relief shows his name and title and an eagle seizing a lion. Another
smaller inscription names his father, who is not called king, and says
he has built the dwelling-place Girsu; and a third enumerates the temples
he had built— to two gods and four goddesses — his worship of his patron
goddess, his erection of the city walls of Sirgulla and of the " house of
the graver," 3 and the making of vases, gates of bronze, and a statue of
himself. If the " house of the graver " means a school for the instruction
of scribes, — and it can scarcely have any other meaning, — this is probably
the earliest mention of an educational endowment in any country of the
world.

The so-called vulture stele — an inscribed slab, with outlines showing
vultures preying upon human heads — belongs to the reign of this king's son;
the inscription upon it is said to represent a high priest of the Sun-god

1 Journ. R. A. Soc., 1891, p. 394.

2 F. Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens-Assyriens, pp. 282, 291. 3 /£., p. 286.

261

262 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

invoking blessings from the "spirit of the Sun-god" and the spirit of heaven
and earth.1 His name signifies " one who goes to E-Anna," an exact counter-
part to the Egyptian idiom describing favoured ministers of the king or
the gods. Another king of Lagash, who lias left inscriptions, made canals
and storehouses and built temples, especially a " temple of the number
Fifty," and a " palace of the oracle of the god of Tin-tir," i.e. Babel.

The middle period of archaic art includes the first series of inscriptions
by the patesis of Sirgulla, and begins, according to Hommel, about 4000
B.C. (or at latest, 2800 B.C.). He inclines to the belief that the title
means " he who bears the graver," i.e. the scribe, and, since the priests
were scribes, the priest ; and conjectures that the kings of Sirgulla were
succeeded by patesis when the kings of Erech and Agade obtained
sovereignty over the rest of Babylonia. It is possible, however, that the
word had not the associations of inferiority which we attribute to it, and
that a priest king was a greater potentate than a king without priestly rank.
The title of "supreme Patesi " is given to Marduk by Nebuchodorosor,
and certainly none of the earlier rulers, bearing the name of king, can
have possessed greater power or wealth than the patesi Gudea. A cylinder
of this period shows the legend of Gilgames 2 already developed. Harder
stones than the limestone used for the vulture stele and such fragmentary
monuments now came into use. A threshold of black diorite was
dedicated as a " valuable stone " to a goddess,3 and progress had already
gone so far that we meet with records of decay, for the inscriptions begin
to speak of the restoration as well as the building of temples.

A few of the earliest monuments fall into groups, when the order of suc-
cession or genealogical relationship of the rulers commemorated is known
for two or three generations. The chronological order of the groups and
of the detached monuments is for the most part a matter of conjecture.
A lady Ganoul, daughter of Ur-bau, patesi of Lagash,4 offers an inscription
for her own life and that of her husband, Nam-magh-ni, to the god Nin-
girsu, the powerful warrior of En-lilla, and another fragment gives a new
patesi, Ur-nin-ghoul. Another patesi, E-anna-du, is son of Akurgal, also
patesi of Lagash; and as this name is associated with that of the early king
Ur-nina (so that either the name is repeated, or the rulers bear the title
of king and patesi indifferently, which is far from unlikely), M. Heuzey
suggests that pious kings used the semi-religious title in devout humility ;
and it is also possible that the royal power was really in a way shared,
as in the sacred cities of Cappadocia, between royal and priestly
colleagues.

Another patesi, Entena, who is son and father of an En-adda-du, men-

1 Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, pp. 241, 288.

2 This hero, whose adventures are narrated in the same epic as the story of the
Flood, has for some years been called provisionally Izdubar or Gisdubar. For the above
phonetic value of the character see Bab. and Or. Record, vol. iv. p. 264.

3 Gesch. Bab. 11. Ass., p. 298.

4 Rev. (CAss.y iii. pp. 78-85. M. Heuzey reads Sirpourla ; this may be the sacred,
and Lagash the secular name of the city.

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD. 263

tions the temple of the number Fifty ; one of the latter, also a patesi,
is described as " nourished at the breasts of the sovereign of the moun-
tains."1 M. de Sarzec2 gives another tablet of Urnina, king of Lagash, son
of Nini-haldu, son of Gursar, neither of whom are called king, and adds,
apparently, a fifth descendant of Ur-nina to M. Heuzey's genealogy of the
line, which therefore stands : —

Ur-nina, King of Lagash.

En-anna-du I., patesi of Lagash,
his eldest son.

I
Entena, patesi.

En-anna-du, patesi.
Entemena, patesi of Lagash,

called son of En-anna-du, patesi of Lagash, and descendant of Ur-nina,
king of the same city. The obverse of his tablet contains a mention of
" the house of fruits," and the fragmentary words, ". . . to the sixty
houses . . ." Perhaps the explanation of this phrase may be dis-
covered hereafter, in connection with that of a title, "Chief of the 600
of the country," met with in a document of much later date.3 There are
traces of a parallel line, in which a king Ur-nina is succeeded by Akurgal,
king and patesi, and the latter by E-anna-du, king and patesi ; but the
relation between the two is not yet clear, and there is an early king,
Uru-kha-ghi-na, independent of both, and perhaps earlier. Winckler4 pro-
poses the order King Ur-nina; King Akurgal, his son ; King Ur-nina II. ;
Patesi En-anna-du, his son ; Patesi Entena, his son; Patesi En-anna-du II.,
his son ; an unknown Patesi Akurgal (of the vulture stele), and Patesi
E-anna-du, his son.

DuVing the whole of this pre-Sargon period, Lagash appears as the
principal city in the land, our information being derived from the ex-
cavations of M. de Sarzec at Telloh, as the Arabs call the heap of ruins.
It is, of course, possible that other unexplored mounds may still conceal
monuments of equally startling interest and antiquity ; but for the present
we know of no earlier centre of government than this, situated on
the eastern bank of the Shatt-el-hai and some distance to the north of
Eridu. The site may be called central for Southern Mesopotamia, if we
use that name to denote the country between Bagdad and the Persian
Gulf on the one hand, and between the Tigris and the Palla-kopas Canal
on the other. This region was broken up into various and varying king-
doms, but its history can and must, to a considerable extent, be treated as
one. We cannot call the whole region Babylonia, while Babylon is still
one town among many, and by no means always the chief, and yet a

1 M. Jules Oppert, ib., p. 86.

2 Ib., iv. pp. 146-9.

3 Documents juridiques de f Assyrie. MM. Oppert and Menant, p. 72.

4 Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, p. 328.

264 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

distinctive name is needed, for which Mesopotamia may serve, on the
understanding that it is not taken, at this period, to include the upper
course of the two rivers above Sippara.

The waters of the Persian Gulf extended much further inland 4000
years B.C. than now. The lower marshy course of the Euphrates would
therefore be considerably shorter, while the immediate vicinity of the
Tigris would remain comparatively unattractive, on account of the violent
and uncertain floods of that river. We have seen that the ancient princes
of Lagash dug canals, and indeed canalization is older than the written
character to which we owe our earliest knowledge of the country, since
one of the commonest ideograms and phonetic signs of the ancient
language is derived from its practice. The channel of an immense canal,
now filled with sand, is still visible near Telloh, and the completion of
the Shatt-el-Hai itself probably represents the first great step towards
carrying out the Babylonian system of irrigation, which consisted in lead-
ing the waters of the two rivers to cross and to unite.

We know nothing about the boundaries of the two ancient kingdoms of
Sumer and Akkad, except that all the early rulers, whose authority was
recognised in any way throughout Mesopotamia, hastened to call them-
selves kings or lords of both. It is also agreed that Akkad included north
and middle Babylonia, and Sumer the south towards the sea. Eridu,
Lagash, Ur, and Larsa belonged to Sumer, and Erech to Akkad. The
southern State led the way, as the order in which the names appear is
enough to show ; the difference between the two is like that between
Upper and Lower Egypt, save that in Mesopotamia civilization advanced
most rapidly towards the Delta, and was derived by legend from the sea ;
while in Egypt history and tradition alike represent it as coming to life in
mid-stream. The men of Akkad were Highlanders, the men of Sumer
dwellers in the plain. The speech of Sumer was called the sacred language
or the language of nobles, that of Akkad was called the tongue of slaves
or women.1 Nevertheless, so far as it is possible to compare two im-
perfectly understood dialects together, both appear to belong to the same
group, the Altaic, and the kingdom of Sumer and Akkad, as compared
with the rest of the world, like Egypt with its double crown, forms a more
than usually homogeneous unit.

In later but still ancient history, frequent mention is made of three
districts in Mesopotamia, Kaldu, Kardunias, and Akkad, that is to say
the land of the Chaldeans, Babylonia, in the narrower sense, and the

1 Two ideographs, read erne sal, are translated by most Assyriologists "woman's
language," and Hommel suggests as a parallel the co-existence of the literary Sanscrit
with the vernacular Prakrit in India. But the Sumerians who talk about " women and
men" would scarcely use the term "woman's language" as one of disparagement. No
really plausible explanation of it has yet been suggested, and Dr. Bezold (Proc. S.B.A.,
1888, p. 17) may be right in maintaining that its real meaning is still unknown, and may
perhaps have nothing to do with either " tongue " or " woman." If, however, the current
interpretation is finally established, it will be difficult not to see in the term a reference
to the importance of women, as it were, the "tongue of the people where women rule,"
as if the language of Lycia had been called "the tongue of the Amazons."

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD. 265

country immediately north of Babel, of which Sippara was capital. The
time when Mesopotamia was divided only between the kindred, but rival
stocks of Sumer and Akkad has left no trace except in the phrase which
makes the command of both the symbol of supreme power. The dif-
ferences between them must have been of purely tribal or provincial im-
portance, for the religion, the literature, and the culture of Babylonia and
Chaldaea, before the advent of the Semitic race, were so far identical that
even the youngest of the two possessed such mastery over them as to
dominate the advancing aliens, and to teach their rulers to covet no higher
glory than to be kings of Sumer and Akkad.

It is even probable, notwithstanding the close association between the
southern kingdom and the sea, that the founders both of Sumer and Akkad
entered Mesopotamia by the same or a strictly parallel course. In Egypt
and China the cardinal points are the same as in Europe, and follow what
may be called the natural system, by which the speaker is conceived as
looking towards the midday sun, so that the south is before him, the north
behind, the west on his right hand, and the east on his left. In Babylonia,
on the contrary, " The south is Elam, the north is Akkad, the east is
Suedin and Guti, the west is Martu ; on the right hand is Akkad, on the
left Elam, in front is Martu, behind is Suedin and Guti : " l in other words,
what is considered as the front lies south-east, the back is north-west ; on
the right lies the north-east, and on the left the south-west. The orienta-
tion of the zigurrats or storied towers, like a step pyramid, with a shrine
for pinnacle, was carefully attended to, and it has long been noticed that
the corners of such buildings in Babylonia face the cardinal points as the
sides do in Egypt. Inattentive moderns who " change their skies " too
often to retain a strong impression of any one aspect of them, are struck
by the frequency in these early texts of references to " the four regions."
But to primitive sages, whose chief intellectual interest lay in the con-
templation of the heavens, the four regions of the sky were no less real
than the corresponding notion, thence derived, of the four quarters of the
world. The only sufficient reason why a people, who paid attention to
the points of the compass, should diverge in this way from the common
or natural usage, is for them to occupy a compact and limited territory
lying in a direction corresponding to the shifting of the cardinal points.

A glance at the map will show that the Mesopotamia of Sumer and
Akkad answers exactly to this description. The plain which stretches
between the two rivers faces exactly south-west, and settlers entering it
by the narrow neck by Sippara and Agade would have Elam in front of
them, Syria on their right, and the mountain tribes of Guti2 (the Goyim of
the Hebrews) on their left. The second -sentence in this tablet gives the
cardinal points of Assyria, according to which the front is to the west and

1 Babylonian and Oriental Record, Jan., 1888. "The shifted cardinal points from
Egypt to early China," by M. Terrien de la Couperie, commenting on a tablet translated
by Mr. Pinches in 1883.

2 An inscription of one Lasi-rab (?) "the mighty king of Guti," was found by the Penn-
sylvanian Expedition. (Hilprecht, I.e., p. 13.)

266 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

the south on the left hand, a view which finds its justification in the posi-
tion of the city of Assur, which has its back to the Tigris at a point where
the stream is flowing due south.1

The earliest names of States were taken from those of cities. Sargon
and his son are called " king of the city," sc. Agade, and so is a prince
Bin-gani, the son of a king of Agade.2 The urban character of the earliest
settlements is shown by the fact that a word, used in the formulas of con-
juration and translated in the Assyrian bi-linguals by " man," really sig-
nifies " man of an enclosure/' or townsman, man and citizen being
synonymous.3 The common ideographic name for the city of Erech (the
modern Warka) signifies simply " dwelling-place," and settled, associated
dwelling-places were undoubtedly the possession most characteristic of
the men of Sumer and Akkad when their history began.4 Erech, like
Abydos, was a favourite burying-place, and for the same reason, as it stood
on rising ground surrounded by low flats, which were habitually under
water from March to November. That and Nipur are among the most
ancient of the great cities of Akkad, but the importance of Ur, Eridu, and
Larsa (supposed to be the Ellasar of the book of Genesis), as well as of
Lagash, is perhaps older still. Independent rulers of Ur who have left
important monuments were approximately contemporary with the later
patesis of Lagash, of whom Gudea is the most illustrious. These monu-
ments belong to the last or third period of archaic art, and are conjecturally
dated by Hommel about 3000 B.C., i.e. about 800 years after the date
assigned to Sargon. This estimate does not depend exclusively upon the
chronology of Nabonidus, and it is not much too early to allow for all
that has to find a place somewhere between Gudea and the historical
dynasties of Berosus and the Babylonian chronicles.

The art of the age of Sargon is undoubtedly more archaic than that of
Gudea, but a much less interval than 800 years might suffice to account
for the difference, if we allow for two facts, that the land of Akkad was less
advanced than that of Sumer, and that Sargon (Sargina or Sargani) was
not even a man of Akkad, but a Semitic prince, as his name shows ; so
that the Sumerian culture, which he and his people possessed, was a com-
paratively new and second-hand acquirement. How much allowance
should be made for this, it is no doubt impossible to say, and until a tablet
is found, showing which of the rulers, whose names and places in the
chronological series are already known, were contemporaries, opinions may
differ as to the comparative date of Sargon and Gudea.

If the former flourished circ. 2500 B.C. and preceded Gudea, the in-

1 So the Deccan (Dakhin = south or "right hand") is the district which invaders
advancing eastward have on their right, and Arabia Felix that on the lucky (or right
hand) side, looking from Egypt. The Egyptians themselves " s^ orientaient vers I'onest."

* Gesch. B. u. A., p. 300.

3 Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, T. G. Pinches. Journal Roy. As. Soc., 1884, p.
312.

4 It is possible that the ancient cities, like Ur and Erech, were called the dwelling-
place of the particular god worshipped in them, but even so the patron deity was thought
of as domesticated because his worshippers were so.

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD. 267

terval between them must have been very short, for Gudea can scarcely
have been later than the first Chaldaean dynasty of Berosus ; while if
Sargon was the later of the two, all the considerations which have led to
the assumption of a period of 1,200 years between Sargon and the earliest
monuments remain unimpaired, and Gudea would have to be placed
between 3700 and 2500 B.C., and not earlier, considering the number of
his predecessors, than 2800. There is thus less room for difference of
opinion as to the date of the monuments of Gudea and his successors than
as to that of Sargon, and as the literary texts relating to the latter prince
exist only in late copies and translations, the history of the great patesi of
Sirgulla may be narrated before the legend of the famous king of Agade.

The later patesis of Lagash reigning about or after 3000 B.C. are
Urban, or Ur-bagas (called Ur-ukh by George Smith), whose name is the
same as that of a king of Ur, whose son Dungi almost rivals, in the copious-
ness of his inscriptions, Gudea himself and his son Ur-ningirsu. The
monuments of Ur are supposed to be slightly later than those found at
Telloh (Lagash), and Eridu is the only town of which separate mention
has been found before this. Kings of Nisin 1 and of Larsa follow those of
Ur, and if the later date suggested for Sargon of Agade should be con-
firmed, his chronological place would be after all of these. At present there
are inscriptions of four or five princes of Lagash who call themselves
kings, and of eight who bear the title of patesi. The city, or the territory
was divided into four quarters, which are more frequently mentioned
than Shirpurla-ki or Lagash itself, so that the Egyptian hieroglyph for town,
which indicates a similar arrangement ,/<7;>\ represents one of the common
possessions of the two nations before ^^/ their separation.2

The character of the inscriptions of this period is distinctively cuneiform ;
and art, as exemplified in the statues of Gudea and others found at Telloh,
is highly developed. The portrait statues are scarcely inferior in realistic
truth and vigour to the best Egyptian work of the ancient monarchy,
which they resemble also in the intractable character of the material used,
and in the ethnological type of the subjects represented. This type is
described by all students of the monuments in substantially similar terms.
Its general characteristics are "a shaven crown, round head, low but
wide and straight forehead, slightly prominent cheekbones, profile or-
thognate with rather fleshy lips, and a big nose not aquiline, hair rather
curly than wavy, probably medium stature." 3 It thus resembles the

1 According to Hilprecht (Lc., pp. 11, 28), the name of the king of Nisin (or Isin).
read Gamil should be f/r-ninib, while the existence of a king Ibil or Inisin of Ur, which
has been doubted since George Smith, is now confirmed. An inscription of a new king.
Bur-sin I., contains the titles "powerful shepherd of Ur, restorer of the oracle tree of
Eridu, the lord who delivers the commands of Erech."

2 A. Baillet, Recueil de Travaux, xi. pp. 31-36, has adduced some evidence to show
that these quarters had a real significance in the municipal organization of Egypt. A
Thirteenth Dynasty Nofer hotep is called "chief scribe of the circumscription (or arron-
dissement] of the south quarter of Abydos." And besides the title of " chief of the
quarter," or quartenier of the city, there are chief quarteniers named.

3 G. Berlin, The Races of the Babylonian Empire. Journal of the Anthropological
Instate, November, 1888, p. 105.

a68 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

sturdier, quasi Caucasian type exemplified in Egypt by the Sheik el Beled
and Ra-hotep. The features approach much more nearly to the Caucasian
than to the Tatar or the Semitic type ; but the combination of fairly fine
and regular features with extreme bullet headedness is not met with at any
later period as a characteristic of a whole people. Individuals of the type
are common enough in all mixed races, and in Mesopotamia, from the
earliest times, all classes of the population were more or less mixed.

The intrusion of Elamite and Semitic dynasties modified the features of
the rulers, while the descendants of the ancient princes mingled with the
coarser types both of the indigenous population and the invaders. In all
western nations the mingling of classes in addition to the mingling of races
has been going on so long that specimens of every type may be met with
in every class. The monuments of Assyria and Babylonia seem to show
that there was more resemblance between members of the lower classes,
whether Elamite, Sumerian, or Semitic, than between the specimens of
the ruling class of each type. The common feature is a retreating fore-
head, which, joined with a prominent nose, makes the line of the upper
part of the face continuous, like a parrot's beak. It might have been
doubted whether, in the case of the Telloh remains, the early artist meant
to represent the common soldiers or prisoners as having a lower type of
countenance, or whether they were simply drawn with less care. But the
beak-like profile resembles so closely that of Hittites, North Syrians, and
the men of Askelon on the Egyptian monuments of Rameses II., where
there is certainly no want of skill, that it probably represents a real type.
In later Babylonian and Assyrian art, as in that of Egypt, all the figures
are finished with equal care and skill, while on the oldest cylinders of all,
the features of kings and gods are caricatured, quite as naively as those of
the common people in the Telloh remains.

An inscription of the patesi Ur-bau, upon the gate of a temple, refers to
the "place of decision" or "judgment/'1 as if justice were done in the gate
of the temple. The art of fortification was already invented ; the principle
of an indented outline, with advanced angles of which any two command
doubly the recess between, is clearly illustrated in the plan of a fortress
traced upon a tablet, which lies on the knees of one statue of Gudea,2
while another shows his style for writing (so that the title "he who bears
the graver " would not be inappropriate), and a rule marked with
divisions. He built a palace for himself, and built and dedicated several
temples. He boasts of conquering Elam, and dedicating its spoil to the
god Ningirsu in the temple of the number Fifty. There were either no
kings or none of importance at Agade in his time, so that if a Semitic
dynasty had already reigned there, its power must have vanished.

The inscriptions of this period mention something like twice as many
temples to goddesses as to gods, and a very remarkable expression is
applied in one of Gudea's inscriptions to the goddess Nin-narsag. Gudea,

1 Hommel, G.B.A., p. 314 and n. i.

2 Reproduced by Hommel, p. 332.

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD. 269

the patesi of Sirgulla, he tells us, built a temple in his town of Girsu " to
his lady, the protecting goddess of the city, the mother of its inhabitants,"
or more literally, "the mother of the children of her, of the town."1 If
this version by the late M. Amiaud remains unchallenged, it would appear
that the patron goddess of the city is identified with the city itself, or
rather, perhaps, the "spirit of the city " is deified and worshipped. In
ancient Egypt the existence of a temple sometimes preceded and prompted
the foundation of a town. But the ancient religion of Mesopotamia, in
which the leading idea is to adjure the spirit of heaven and to adjure the
spirit of earth, might very naturally recognise, as the Chinese have always
done, a third power, namely the spirit of humanity, of man the citizen, the
dweller in enclosures, — and associate its most personal and potent deities
with these civic communities. The ancient king is king of the city, and
the ancient god is god of the city, as the primitive mother, " the enlarger
of the family," is the god of the house. The house and the town are the
twin pillars of the primitive domestic civilizations.

Gudea's power extended far beyond the city where he resided. His
ships brought products of all kinds from " Magan, Miluch, Gubi, Nituk,"
and other lands ; " from the sea on the front side of Elam to the lower sea
his foot travelled;" he fetched cedars from "Amanum, the mountain of
cedars, and woods and stone," copper and gold, etc., from other mountains.
Hommel supposes this traffic to have been carried on along the Euphrates
as far as Carchemish ; that the cedar for shipbuilding and other purposes
was obtained from Lebanon, and that the lower sea mentioned was there-
fore the Mediterranean ; but that the hard stone and diorite for the temples
and statues came from the heights bordering Babylonia and the Arabian
desert. Oppert and Amiaud, on the other hand, regard Magan as the
Sinaitic peninsula, and Gubti ( = qubti) as Egypt. Amiaud's translation of
the same texts makes Gudea boast that by the power of the gods various
countries, rich " in trees of every species, have sent him ships laden with
all sorts of trees," and that " Ningirsu, the lord beloved of him, has forcibly
opened for him the roads from the sea of the highlands to the lower sea."

Amiaud understands the lower sea in the obvious sense, as the Persian
Gulf, but supposes the sea of the highlands to be the Mediterranean, a
term which seems as inappropriate to it as the "upper sea" is to the
Persian Gulf. If the Persian Gulf is the lower sea, the only real sea of the
highlands which we can suppose Gudea to know of would be one of the
Armenian lakes. Later kings of Nineveh constantly invaded the land of
Nairi, and knew both its lakes ; and even if Gudea was a less powerful
prince than Tiglath-Pileser, his geographical knowledge may have reached
as far as the latter's conquests in this direction. This is the more probable
as the population of Mesopotamia must have been recruited in part from
these or the adjoining highlands.2

1 Records, N.S., ii. 75. This inscription is not given in Schrader's collection.

2 Mr. Boscawen suggests (Bab. and Or. Kec., Sept. 1893, p. 7) that the "mountains
of Menua" (Gudea, B., vi. 4) may be connected with the name Menuas in Vannic inscrip-
tions, and point to the neighbourhood of Armenia.

270 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

The historic probability of either view will turn upon the relative age of
Gudea, and of those kings of Egypt who worked the mines of Magan, and
brought stone from its hills by boat down the Red Sea to the port of
Koptos. Amiaud supposes Gudea to have flourished after the Sixth or last
Dynasty of the ancient monarchy of Egypt. The mines and quarries of
Sinai were worked in the Third Dynasty, if not before, and there is no diffi-
culty in imagining the same point to be reached by Sumerian vessels, if we
suppose the Egyptians themselves to have reached Egypt by rounding the
Arabian peninsula. The half-way house established on the same route in
South Arabia and the Land of Punt must have contributed to keep the
route open ; and the recent researches of Dr. Glaser,1 which carry the his-
tory of the Minseans back to circ. 2000 B.C., do away with any hesitation
that might be felt in assuming, upon merely circumstantial evidence, that an
important Hamitic colony was settled so early at this point. Such evidence
was afforded by the Egyptian legends of the Land of Punt, and by the cha-
racter of Yemenite civilization ; but the chief reason why we should expect
to find such a colony of even prehistoric antiquity is because such a link
is necessary to connect Egyptian and Babylonian civilization.

Wherever a great block of diorite could be transported, emigration upon
a national scale could certainly take place. If the Egyptians entered Egypt
by the Red Sea, Gudea might import diorite by the same waters from
Sinai; and conversely, if an early Babylonian prince could send his ships
so far for an article of luxury, men unencumbered with such merchandise
might easily accomplish the shorter journey to Kopt or Kosseir. And the
same argument would apply if we suppose the prehistoric men of Punt
to have been the intermediaries between Sinai and the mouth of the
Euphrates.

The sea on the front side of Elam must certainly be the Persian Gulf,
as the cardinal points appear by the orientation of the oldest buildings to
have been the same as in the tablet quoted above. But it is less certain
that the " lower sea " must represent the Mediterranean. The routes
across the desert were not the first to be opened, and so long as the
Mediterranean was naturally approached from Mesopotamia by a journey
up the Euphrates, it could scarcely be regarded as the lower water in com-
parison with the Persian Gulf. This name would be at least equally appro-
priate to the Red Sea, the first step towards which is a longish voyage
southward and forward, according to Babylonian phraseology, in the same
line as that of the Euphrates. The Assyrian kings distinguish the lakes
Van and Urmia as the upper and the lower lake of the Nairi lands, and
the northern and southern tributaries of the Tigris as the Upper and
the Lower Zab, showing that the words have what we should consider
their natural sense ; and in a passage where the upper sea of the setting
sun is mentioned, the reference is evidently to the northern part of the
Mediterranean approached from the land of the Hittites, in contradistinc-

1 Skizze der Geschichtc Arabiens von den attest en Zeiten bis zum Propheten
Muhammad. See/w/, Book III. chap. viii.

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD. 271

tion to the part of the same sea, reached through the land of Canaan or
Southern Palestine. And though two possibilities do not prove each other,
two probabilities, which would confirm each other if reduced to a cer-
tainty, do gain in strength by every accession of evidence in favour of
either one. Provisionally, therefore, it may be regarded as at least possible
that Gudea's ships traded round Arabia as well as up the Euphrates.

A little ornament in the Hague Museum bears an inscription which has
been translated as follows : " Gudea patesi of Sirgulla dedicates this to
Gin-dung-nadda-addu,1 his wife." The lady's name is interpreted " maid
of the god Nebo," and it is conjectured that he may have reigned in her
right. The most archaic texts in the ancient language of Mesopotamia
are remarkable for the precedence given to the female sex in all formulas
of enumeration. " Goddesses and gods, women and men," are always
mentioned in that order, and we should therefore expect to find earlier
notices of women in the monumental record of Babylonia than even in
Egypt. There is an old Babylonian statue of a woman, not a goddess ;
alone, not, as is so common in Egypt, in a group with husband and
children, or husband only ; and the existence of such a monument is a
strong proof that the wealth of the period might be possessed by women in
their own right.

The special reason for imagining Gudea to have reigned as his wife's
consort is furnished by the inscription in which he says of himself:
" Mother I had not ; my mother was the water deep. A father I had not ;
my father was the water deep. Dunziddu, the man who turned his eye
upon me, and so prolonged my life . . . " 2 The passage is obscure,
but it certainly sounds like a variant of the legend of Sargon and the water-
man Akki. There is another early patesi whose name is unknown, and it
is a significant fact that the earliest rulers of Sumer and Akkad boast of
their unknown parentage, while in later Assyrian inscriptions, "Son of no-
body " is a favourite term of contempt used in designating usurpers.

If the ancient race was in the habit of making daughters the heiresses of
property and power, the king consorts would be chosen (like the husbands
of Basque heiresses) for their personal qualities, not their birth ; while a
great ruler, whose parentage was in no way illustrious, would prefer to leave
his origin unknown, that loyal imaginations might suppose it to be divine.
Gudea was succeeded by his son Ur-ningirsu, but this is not inconsistent
with inheritance through women, as the son may inherit from his mother,
even when his father is not counted in the family at all. Two Akkadian
kings have names which would not be inappropriate as the titles of a con-
sort : " Oh, Merodach, as a comrade spare her," and " May Bau vivify her
womb ; " and the phraseology of religious texts confirms these indications
that the earliest usages of Mesopotamia went even beyond that of Egypt in
exalting the place of women in the family.

Ur, the modern Mugheir, which is remarkable as the only city of ancient
Babylonia situated to the west of the Euphrates, is supposed to have been

1 fC.B.t Hi. I, p. 65, Gin-umun-pa-ud-du. 2 Hommel, Geschichte, p. 320.

272 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

founded somewhere about 3000 B.C. Sin, the moon-god, was its patron
deity, and throughout the history of Babylonia it remained famous as the
seat of his worship. It has even been suggested that the ancient name of
the god may have been derived from the city, if the name of the city was
not derived from the god.1 Urban,2 who built the temple of the moon and
at least two other edifices at Ur (one of which was a zigurrat, or tower in
stages), must have been one of the most powerful and energetic of the
kings of Sumer and Akkad, for the bricks and tablets bearing his name are,
still, more numerous than those of any other Babylonian monarch except
Nebuchadnezzar, though they are now met with mainly in the foundations
of buildings erected by later princes. He calls himself king of the city of
Ur, as well as king of Sumer and Akkad, and his other favourite titles were
" the powerful man," and " the eldest son of Bel his king." He founded
Larsa and built a temple at Erech, and at Sirgulla or Lagash, the patesis of
which now seem to have acknowledged the authority of Ur. A cylinder
represents him with shaven head and beardless face, like the statues of
Gudea. No remains of his have yet been discovered at Telloh, but those
of his son Dungi are plentiful there.

Dungi completed a temple begun by his father, which Nabonidus re-
stored, and himself restored the temple of the number Fifty, of which men-
tion has been made before. We have a cylinder dedicated to him by the
son of a patesi of Sirgulla, who apparently had not inherited his father's
office ; while a patesi of Nipur, who had done so, bequeaths a cylinder
which represents him as pouring a libation to a god. He built the " great
wall " of Eana, and a temple treasure-house in Girsu, and his name is
found on a duck-shaped weight of twelve minas.3 Another tablet in honour
of Dungi bears a name of its own : " I will live in the protection of the
king's grace,"4 for the Egyptian habit of giving proper names to things, as a
means of declaring their quality, was shared by the Babylonians. Canals
and particular gates of a temple, to which such names are given, might of
course be named merely as a matter of convenience and for identification,
but no such motive will account for the naming of a merely commemora-
tive tablet or of a statue, like that which Gudea calls, not by the proper
name of the goddess to whom it was dedicated, but at length, " Goddess
who fixes the destinies of heaven and earth, Nintu, mother of the gods,
prolong the life of Gudea, the builder of the temple."5 In the legend of
the creation, the preceding chaos is described as the time when "the
heaven above had not yet announced, or the earth beneath recorded a
name,"6 and this sense of the almost creative power of words is closely con-
nected with the mental idiosyncrasies which made the men of Sumer and
Akkad the first and perhaps the most consistent of realists.

The next inscriptions met with are those of some kings of Nisin, be-

1 Hommel, Vor-Sem. Kult., p. 205. 2 Or Ur-bagas, Smith's Urukh.

3 K.B., iii. i, 81, 3. 4 Geschichte B. ti. ^.,337-

5 Records, N.S., ii. 76. "Bur-sin is the beloved of Ur," is the name of some object
dedicated by the King of Ur of that name. K.B.> I.e. 89.

6 Records of the Past, N.S., vol. i. p. 133.

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD. 273

tween 2700 and 2500 B.C., or thereabouts. One of these, Ismi-dagon,
whose inscription was found at Ur, calls himself king of Nisin, and of
Sumer and Akkad, and " husband of the love of the goddess Ninni" (Istar).
He was succeeded by his son, and the various inscriptions of these kings
show that they claimed authority, in some form or other, over all the prin-
cipal cities of Mesopotamia. Thus one Gamil-nindar, or Ur-nindar, calls
himself also, " Shepherd of Nipur, captain of Ur, guardian 1 of the sacred
palms of Eridu, and gracious lord of Erech." 2 Libit-adar, with similar
titles, claims to have restored the " house of night " for the goddess
Nindar, to whom a hymn is addressed by another king: "Among the
queens thou only art lord." Kings of this dynasty seem generally to have
called themselves the beloved or chosen spouse of this goddess (Istar).
The son of the last of these kings of Nisin builds a temple to the long
life of the king of Ur? Slightly later, say 2300 B.C., other kings of Ur,
Gamil-sin and Amar-sin, take the title of king of the Four Regions, and
contract tablets dating from their reigns are still in existence.

Somewhere in the interval between the first and last group of the kings
of Ur, a king of Erech reigned, according to Hommel before 2300 B.C.,
who has left inscriptions, in which he describes an endowment in honour
of his god and mother, the erection of a palace, which has been partly
excavated, and the restoration of a temple to the goddess Istar.

Historical inscriptions were collected in private libraries as well as by
the later kings, and the abundance of such material may be gauged by
the accidental appearance of a copy of an inscription of this ancient king.
The inscription is to the following effect : " Singashid, king of Erech, king
of Amnanum, and nourisher of Eana, to Lugalbanda his god and Ningal his
goddess. When he built Eana, he erected Ekankal, the house which is the
seat of the joy of his heart. During his dominion he will endow it with
thirty gur of wheat, twelve mana of produce (?), eighteen qa of oil accord-
ing to the tariff4 and the shekel of gold. May his years be years of
plenty." To this is added a colophon in Semitic Babylonian : " Copy of
the tablet of usu stone, the property of E. which N., son of Mitsiraa
(i.e. the Egyptian), has written." 5 In a land where such records were
preserved out of disinterested curiosity or love of learning, the official
annals, if they had only reached us in a complete form, might have been
relied on almost implicitly.

The later kings of Ur and those of Nisin bear Semitic names, and their
inscriptions present some peculiarities which have caused their language
to be called " New Sumerian." Those of the kings of Ur who call them-
selves kings of the Four Regions, do not claim the title of kings of Sumer
and Akkad ; and in fact, through the greater part of the earliest history of

1 K.B.i l.c.t 85, " Conjuror."

2 Hommel, G.B.A., p. 338.

3 G.B.A., 340. K.B., /.<:., 87.

* JCB., I.e., 85, " nach clem 1'reise des Lancles.1"
5 Records, N.S., i. 80.
P.C. T

274 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

Mesopotamia, the country seems to have been divided into provinces,
perhaps about the size of the Egyptian nomes, and consisting, like them, of
a capital city and the surrounding territory. Successful local kings annexed
or built additional towns, or exercised a kind of protectorate over the
cities which alternated with their own in supremacy. If all the cities of
Mesopotamia acknowledged the superiority of such a prince, he called
himself the king of Sumer and Akkad ; and if all the cities in his immedi-
ate neighbourhood did so, he claimed the vaguer title of lord of the Four
Regions. But we do not find in historic times any tendency to group the
cities of Sumer round one capital, under a single king, and those of Akkad
under another. The city was the most permanent unit, and even the
greatest king was only king of the city in his own capital ; but the national
unit, so far as such a thing existed, embraced the two stocks or tribes of
tradition, and the only really national kings were those who ruled over both.

During the first dynasty on the Babylonian list, some kings of Ur,
Larsa, and Erech seem to have reigned independently of the northern
dynasty. Erech, we know, suffered during this time from an Elamite in-
vasion, and it has been suggested that the expulsion from the land of an
Elamite tyrant, Chumba-ba, by Namrassit, king of Erech, described in the
deluge epos, may be founded upon historical facts of this time.1 On the
whole, the most probable date for Sargon of Agade may be conjectured to
lie somewhere between the reign of Dungi and the other early kings of
Ur, and the first kings of Nisin, whose names betoken a Semitic origin.
Even in the monuments of Gudea, there are two distinct ethnological types
represented, like the two in the earliest Egyptian monuments, the Sumerian
which has been already described, to which the kings belong, with round
heads, generally shaven, and projecting cheekbones ; and a long-headed
type, with long hair and beard, approximating rather to the Arab than the
Aramaean branch of the Semitic family. A Semitic inscription of Dungi's
has also been discovered, and it must be taken as certain that even the
early, purely Sumerian kings had some Semites among their subjects.

The most sceptical of Assyriologists could scarcely improve upon the
picture of this class and its relations to the settled inhabitants of the
country given in the story of Abraham in the book of Genesis. Pastoral,
nomad tribes of this race probably wandered over all the uncultivated
parts of Mesopotamia, and gradually adopted, with a few characteristic
differences, the social, commercial, religious and literary conceptions of
.their neighbours. Civilization converts the nomad more easily into a
merchant than into an artizan, or an agriculturist ; and as the profits of
trade depend upon the prosperity of customers in every region, the growth
of the Semitic population contributed to increase the vicissitudes of for-
tune experienced by the kingdom of Mesopotamia, as well as to extend
the area of alliances and conquests.

The Sumerian king of a city stays at home and builds, and the submis-

1 G.B.A., 342. Jensen (W. Z. f. d. A", d. M. 1892, p. 58) proposes to connect
Chumba with Haman, in the book of Esther.

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD. 275

sion of one city to another seems to have been a purely voluntary act The
Semitic leader of a tribe, on the other hand, aimed at conquest. The
warriors of the tribe were easily transformed into an army, which fought
for the possession of cities it had not built, as the tribe strove for access
to the wells and pastures it required. Finally, while the Sumerian god of
the city was a benignant and pacific spirit, of whose nature the paternal
city king was a reflection or reproduction, Semitic religion wedded itself to
the warlike passions of the people, and the most ferocious of the Assyrian
kings gave the praise of victory to their god Assur after every destructive
and sanguinary conquest. The foundation of the Assyrian monarchy may
be taken as marking roughly the transfer of political supremacy, from the
mixed population of Sumer and Akkad, to the race in which the Semitic
element was predominant ; but the encroachment of the latter was gradual,
and may have begun with the reign of Sargon.

This king's name is frequently mentioned in astronomical and omen
tablets, but the two principal documents relied on for his history are, first
an autobiography derived only from a new Assyrian copy in Assurbanipal's
library, and, though, no doubt, translated from some Sumerian original,
evidently of a semi-mythological character; and secondly, a document
generally described as the Annals, or more accurately the Omens of Sargon
and Naram-sin. The first of these texts is given as follows by Sayce and
Hommel : " My mother was a princess, my father I knew not, the brother
of my father dwelt in a mountain. In the city Azupirani, on the banks of
the river Euphrates, my mother, the princess, conceived me ; in a secret
place she brought me forth. She laid me in a basket of reeds, with bitu-
men its mouth she closed. She gave me to the river which drowned me
not (did not change itself over me, Hommel). The river carried me
along. To Acci the water-drawer1 did it bring me. Acci the water-
drawer in the goodness of his heart lifted me up. Acci the water-drawer
as his own son nurtured me. Acci the water-drawer as his gardener made
me, and in my gardenership did the goddess Ishtar love me. (I became
king, and for forty-five) years I exercised royal sway. The men of the black-
headed race I governed. Over rugged mountains (difficult paths, H.) in
chariots of bronze I rode.2 I governed the upper mountains. I ruled the
rulers of the lower mountains. To (the sea coast?) three times did I
advance. Nitukki I subdued, Durili the great bowed itself. When a
king who comes after me rules the blackheaded people . . ." and
performs the other exploits above enumerated, what will occur remains
unknown, as the rest of the tablet is wanting.3

The majority of Assyriologists seem disposed to treat this text as a
translation of an original document having the same authenticity as the
avowed copies of the inscriptions of kings like Singashid and Agukak-

1 Winckler, K.B., iii. I, 101, "Der Wasserausgiesser," a pourer of libations, i.e. a
priest, the association of ideas being the same as in the Egyptian neb. See also his
Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, p. 30. Sayce has ' ' Akki the irrigator."

2 73., "The mighty ones . . . with axes of bronze I . . ' ."

3 Hommel, G.B.A., 302. Hibbert Lectures, pp. 26, 7.

276 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

rime. Hornmel identifies Nitukki with Dilmun, the island in the delta
of the two rivers, and Durili with a border city of Elam, and argues
plausibly that the claim to such modest conquests as these is more likely
to be historical than the boastful pretensions of the Omen tablet. Still,
as a matter of internal evidence alone, the narrative has several suspicious
features. Ancient Sumerian kings professed to be of unknown parentage
and claimed goddesses as their wives, and in addition to these local traits,
the story of the predestined king, who is exposed in his youth and
brought up in. obscurity by humble foster parents, has been told in too
many times and places for it to be easy to accept even the earliest ver-
sion of it as historical. The love of Istar for a gardener is also a matter
of classical tradition, and it would be too much to suppose the goddess
to have had entanglements with both a real and a disguised " giver of.
greenness to what lives." The text no doubt reproduces the ancient
legend respecting the birth and parentage of Sargon, and there would be
no intentional falsification of documents, whenever the familiar legend
was thrown into the usual autobiographical form, to complete some classic
" Book of Kings " for the use of students.

M. Terrien de la Couperie has endeavoured to identify some of the names
in the Sargon legend with those in the Chinese account of the mythical
emperor Shinnung, but in substance the resemblance is greater with the
story of How tseih, one of the legendary ancestors of the Chow dynasty.
His mother's name is mentioned, and his birth was miraculous ; for the
rest "he was placed in a narrow lane, but the sheep and the oxen pro-
tected him with loving care. He was placed in a wide forest where he
was met with by the woodcutters. He was placed on the cold ice, and a
bird screened and supported him with its wings." 1 The " shoes with iron
spikes " used by the great Yu, in the course of his hydraulic achievements,
sound like a reminiscence of some imperfectly understood tradition as to
the first use of metals, and as " rugged mountains " are the last place in
which it becomes possible to " ride in chariots of bronze," the passage is
an argument against the authenticity of the record. The historical kings
of Assyria " climb like a wild ox " when invading the upper mountains,
and their chariots are drawn after them with cords, and even if chariots of
bronze were in use at all in the age of Sargon, we may be sure that pass-
able roads were not more numerous or carried further into the moun-
tains than three ners later.

The mention of the " black-headed races " would be interesting if the
document were really contemporary, but its use in Akkadian hymns is too
frequent for it to be otherwise than primitive.2 Hommel considers it to

1 Legge, Chinese Classics. Shi-King, vol. ii. p. 468. The conclusion is more
purely Chinese : "when the bird went away, How tseih began to wail. His cry was
long and loud so that his voice filled the whole way. When he was able to crawl, he
looked majestic and intelligent. When he was able to feed himself, he fell to planting
large beans."

2 Gula (a name of the goddess Istar) is invoked as "mother, begetter of the black-
headed race," and in a hymn to Merodach " mankind, even the black-headed race, all

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD. 277

apply to the Semites, but the first Semitic king of Mesopotamia would
have more reason to boast of ruling over the settled inhabitants of that
country than over his own kinsfolk, who have never at any time made
special boast of this feature as a note of superiority to light-haired neigh-
bours. On the other hand, the Egyptian monuments show us men of
unquestionably Semitic features with fair complexions, while even among
the modern Arabs, brown hair and blue eyes are not absolutely unknown,
and, what is more remarkable, are rather admired and considered "lucky."
The contrast between this view and the Chinese feeling, according to
which red hair and blue eyes are monstrous, ogre-like features exciting
terror and disgust, would almost by itself suffice to show that the black-
headed people must have belonged to some other stratum of the popula-
tion than Sargina himself.

The " upper mountains " which the speaker claims to have governed,
must be those of Armenia, while the "rulers of the lower mountains"
whom he ruled, would be the kings of Elam and Susiana. This state-
ment would be more nearly true of late Assyrian kings than of any of the
ancient rulers of Sumer and Akkad, and so far it gives a presumption in
favour of a late date for the composition of the text. It might, however,
fit some intermediate period, during the centuries as to which we have
practically no detailed information, but the fragmentary concluding pas-
sage seems to show that the record was meant to serve in some peculiar
way as a portent, and that accordingly both Sargon tablets have less to do
with history than astrology.

Perhaps the continuous recording of celestial and terrestrial events to-
gether began with the age of Sargon, or the oldest recorded portents may
have been associated with his name ; and any reason of this kind would
be sufficient to account for his name being used in a list of ancient
omens, where analogous Chinese texts speak generically of the Son of
Heaven. Each paragraph in the so-called Annals begins with a statement
as to the moon's position, of which the meaning can be only guessed at ;
this is called an omen or a " decision for Sargon," and is followed by
what look like fragments of historical statement, and yet are not at all
like passages from a contemporary, -archaic chronicle. The following
passage, which has been taken to prove that Sargon's power extended as
far as Cyprus, may serve as a specimen : "The moon was favourable to
Sargon, who, at this season, was exalted and had no equal.1 His own
country was at peace. Over (the countries) of the setting sun he crossed,
and for three years at the setting sun ... his hand conquered.
Every place to form but one (empire) he appointed.2 His images at the
setting sun he erected. Their spoil 3 he caused to pass over into the
countries of the sea." * A similar preface introduces the statement 'that

living souls and the four quarters of the earth" come next before the angel hosts of heaven
and earth acknowledging the god. (Hibbert Lectures, pp. 79, 99.)

1 K.B., I.e., 105, " His dread over the land [he shed]."

2 ll>., " He united." 3 •/£:,- " Their captives." 4 Records, N.S., i. 37.

278 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

Naramsin "marched against and seized the country of Maganna." Apart
from the lunar omens, the style bears much more resemblance to the
diffuse retrospective narratives of the later Assyrian kings than to the
meagre annals of which we have a specimen in the Babylonian chronicle.
Future discoveries may clear up the obscurest points, and till then any
opinion about these texts must be held provisionally.1

The astronomical work mentions kings of Ur, whose land is to be in-
vaded ; and a variety of hymns, judged by their language to belong to
this period, may be interpreted as laments, like those of the Hebrew
prophets, over the sufferings of the people ; one of these refers to the
enmity of Elam.2 But of course all inferences from these sources are
mainly conjectural, and with regard to the astronomical work in particu-
lar we need more information as to its real purport before its allusions
can be relied on. The Hittites are mentioned in it as an important
power, as at this time, but it is impossible to tell whether the passage is
a later addition.

Inscriptions have been found of Nur-ramman, who calls himself king
of Larsa, and shepherd of Ur ; and of Sin-idinna, upholder of Ur, king
of Larsa, and of Sumer and Akkad,3 and there may have been others of
about the same period, perhaps towards 2100 B.C. Hommel's account of
this age is based on the assumption that the two first dynasties on the
Babylonian list should be transposed. By following the list we should
find an Elamite dynasty in Larsa at the date assigned to Kudtirnan-
chundi's trophy, and could thus regard the kings of Larsa just mentioned
as having succeeded these aliens. It would also be consistent with a state
of hostilities between Elam and Mesopotamia that the inscription of
Mutabil should belong, as Hommel suggests, to the reign of the second
king of this dynasty. The characters are almost as archaic as in the
inscriptions of Gudea, so that they could not be much later than the
fourth ner B.C., and the substance is rather exceptional. Mutabil was
governor of Badanna (or Durilu), a border fortress of Elam, and boasts
of the destruction he wrought in various towns, and the slaughter of the
chiefs of Northern Elam. In later times Southern Babylonia and Western
Elam formed a district known as the land of Mutbal, a name which might

1 It is much to be desired that the fragments of ancient astrological texts preserved in
the Chinese classics should be studied concurrently with those of Babylonia, first because
any points of resemblance found in them would confirm the presumption already raised
in favour of a common origin for the black-haired and the black-headed races, and
secondly because, in a number of parallel passages, it is certain that the obscurities will
not always lie in precisely the same place, so that the Chinese and the Sumerian riddles
may in turn provide a key to each other. (Cf. Hibbert Lectures, p. 7°-) A calender tab-
let ascribed to the age of Hammurabi enumerates what the king must not do on given
days, and among other holy days mentions " The day when the spirits of heaven and
earth are adored."

2 Hommel, G.B.A., p. 344 ff.

3 K.B., I.e., 91, 3. This prince boasts of the broad, never-failing canals which he
made to bring the water of fruit fulness and abundance (or superfluity) to the city of his
land, wherein he caused men to dwell in peace, and to frequent the markets which he
adorned there, in truth founding " for distant days the fame of his kingdom in the land."

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD. 279

possibly be derived from this ruler, like the Bit Jakin in the same region
of the later empire.1 No cities of capital importance were situated in
this province, and when there is no city, the district takes its name from
the officer, who would be lord of the city if there were one.

It is at this time more than at any other that one might imagine the
old distinction between the kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad to apply.
Akkad acknowledged the dynasty of Babel, while Ur, Larsa, and the
land of Mutbal were governed by at least three generations of Elamite
kings, namely, Simtishilshak, who from the appearance of his name in the
inscriptions, probably held rule himself, Kudur Mabug his son, and Rim-
sin,2 the son of Kudur Mabug, who appears to have been associated with
his father in the kingdom. An inscription for the long life of father and son
describes the former as father of Ja Mutbal (the land of Mutbal), shepherd
of Nipur, guardian of Ur, king of Larsa, king of Sumer and Akkad, titles
which are evidently given in order of their importance. There are two
inscriptions of the same sort, made by the son during his father's life, one
of which couples his father, Kudur Mabug, and the father of his be-
getter, Gi-gunna-azagga ; whether this is a posthumous name of Simtishil-
shak— the second syllable has associations with the Under World — or
whether Rim-sin was not really Kudur Mabug's son, but perhaps descended
from some one with a better title to the crown — are questions which must
be left unanswered for the present. In a third inscription Iri-aku, or
Ri-agu, calls himself the son of Kudur Mabug, the " father of Jamutbal,"
and it is possible that the son united the sceptres of Western Elam and
Larsa. Rim-sin boasts of enlarging the borders of Ur, and of adding to
the temple revenues of I-ninnu.3

Another inscription of Ri-agu, in which Kudur Mabug is not named,
furnishes the principal reason for believing Rim-sin and Riagu to be
different people. It is interesting in itself, both because Erech in it is
called "the ancient" (this in the 23rd century B.C.), and because it men-
tions Ann, Bel, and Ea, the first divine triad recognised in Northern
Babylonia, by the special title of " the great gods." The substance of
various contract tablets of this reign will be considered later, but they
have an incidental historical value on account of their being dated by the
events which signalise different years of the king's reign. The capture of
Nisin, which took place early in the reign, was an event of so much
importance that contract tablets are dated in the 7th, the i3th, or the
28th year after it was taken. The regulation of the waters of the
Euphrates and the Tigris supply other dates, and one, of capital import-
ance, enables us to say that Rim-sin and his father were contemporaries of
Hammurabi.

The sense of the passage is rather obscure, but the year is described as

'-£&>.; 11354.

* Assyriologists debate whether there are two kings, Rim-sin and Ri-agu, or whether
they are different ways of writing the same name.
»JT.ff., I.e., 97.

28o ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

that in which Hammurabi the king, by the help of Anu and Inlilla, in
whose grace he walked, pronounced a decision (?) concerning the father
of Jamutbal and Rim-sin.1 All Rim-sin's inscriptions bear the title of
king of Sumer and Akkad ; but this startling date, coupled with the ex-
pressions used in the inscriptions of Hammurabi, seems to show that
while Rim-sin retained the title, the authority it implied had really passed
to the king of Babel. Kudur Mabug took the new title of " father of the
west," and there can be no doubt that the Elamite dynasty differed from
the earlier monarchies of Ur, Nisin, and other capitals in the extension of
its range east and west outside the compass of the two rivers.

Perhaps this extension proved a cause of weakness, and the boasted
conquest of Nisin may have led to an encounter with Babylon and the
discomfiture of the southern kingdom, but in any case Hammurabi must
have succeeded or supplanted Rim-sin in the protectorate of Mesopo-
tamia, so that the flourishing days of the latter were probably contempo-
rary with the reign of Amar muballit, the father of his rival. The raid of
Kudurnanchundi on Erech may have preceded the accession of the Ela-
mite dynasty, or it may have been the last effort of the aliens before their
exclusion. The conjectural chronology of the kings supplied by Hommel,2
though in the main plausible, is not so absolutely certain but that the
reign of Hammurabi might be shifted a little forward or back in relation
to 2285 B.C., if either of these alternatives should be confirmed. It is
not, however, impossible that the Elamite dynasty itself should have been
attacked by Elamites who had not enjoyed the pleasures of settled life in
the Sumerian plains; and the submission of Kudur Mabug and his son
to Hammurabi may have followed their defeat by Kudurnanchundi. and
have been the price of the alliance of a powerful and flourishing Babylon.

The contract tablets of Rim-sin, found at Erech, show that he intro-
duced the worship of Samas there, and the same evidence proves that
Hammurabi introduced that of Marduk (Merodach), which was previously
unknown in Southern Mesopotamia. Most of the contract tablets of
Hammurabi have been found at Erech ; but one of them, which, owing to
the precedence'given to the name of the god Samas, M. Revillout supposes
to have come from Sippara or Larsa, is dated by no special event, only "the
year of Hammurabi," which may mean the year in which he succeeded
Rim-sin. These tablets not only throw light on the succession of the kings
and their nationality, in so far as illustrated by their religion, but their
absence is itself suggestive. The retention of Sumerian forms, after the
language had become thoroughly Semitized, would not of itself prove more
than the conservatism of lawyers, such as caused English law courts to
use a jargon of Norman French, which was intelligible to no section of
the laity. But this is not all.

It is in the ancient Sumerian cities of Southern Babylonia alone that
contract tablets of the earliest dates (on either side of 2000 B.C.) have
been discovered. The essential character of these contracts does not vary
1 Hommel, G.B.A., p. 362. 2 M., p. 169.

THE ANCIENT CITIES OF SUMER AND AKKAD. 281

in later ages, and it is thus established beyond the possibility of doubt that
the highly developed commercial system of Babylonia was originated by
the race which spoke a language that is now left to Tatars and Finns.
And further, as this system with all its complexity, rivalling the results of
modern enterprise, had many distinctive features which are entirely absent
from modern commercial law, we may fairly argue that the presence of
any one of these features, among little known races in other parts, will
give a certain presumption in favour of their having also belonged to the
same ethnological and philological family.

CHAPTER IV.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA.

(Historical Sketch.}
§ i. FIRST AND SECOND BABYLONIAN DYNASTIES.

IT is with the reign of Hammurabi that the importance of Babylonia — the
country owning Babel as its capital — begins. Zabu, the third king of the
first historical dynasty of Babel, is known to have built or restored temples
in Sippara and Agade, because the incomparable Nabonidus records that
Sagasaltias (1246-1233 B.C.) had to rebuild them. An early inscription, of
which a much damaged copy was found in the library of Senacherib, might
belong to the fourth king, the grandfather of Hammurabi. It seems to
describe the gifts dedicated to the gods, by whose favour the king hopes
to rule his people in peace, and it imprecates curses against those who de-
face the record. The same king was probably also the founder of a city
on the borders of Elam, which bore his name. But this is all that is
known at present of the first five reigns extending over somewhat more
than a century.

Hammurabi (circ. 2250 B.C.) is the sixth on the Babylonian list. The
great majority of the inscriptions of his long reign of fifty-five years, refer
to peaceful works. A bi-lingual inscription upon a statue, translated by
Hommel and Amiaud, however, describes him as " the mighty hero, the
destroyer of the foe, the torrent of battle, the overthrov/er of hostile
nations, he who silences the fight, and carries off the warriors, like statues
of clay, as booty." * The gods by whose favour these triumphs were
achieved, are enumerated in a kind of litany, and the conclusion is a
prayer for the proclamation of the king's name throughout the four regions,
that his great vassals may be submissive and widespread nations faithfully
obedient.

A contract tablet is dated by the year in which Hammurabi, the king,
built a great fortress, mountains high, on the banks of the Tigris, and
called it Karra na Samas, the fortress of the sun-god. But the generality
of his compositions have more in common with the famous canal inscrip-
tion : " I am Hammurabi, the mighty king, king of Ka-dingirra (Babylon),
the king whom the regions obey, the winner of victory for his lord Mero-
dach, the shepherd, who rejoices his heart. When the gods Anu and Bel

1 Hommel, G.B.A., p. 409. Jensen (K.B., iii. i, p. 114) renders the last clause:
" Der die Aufruhrstiirme zur Sattigung fiihrt."

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 283

granted me to rule the people of Sumer and Akkad, and gave the sceptre
into my hand, I dug the canal called * Hammurabi, the blessing of the
people/ which carries with it the overflow of the water for the people of
Sumer and Akkad. I allotted both its shores for food. Measures of corn
I poured forth. A lasting water supply I made for the people of Sumer
and Akkad. I brought together the numerous troops of the people of
Sumer and Akkad, food and drink I made for them ; with blessing and
abundance I gifted them. In convenient abodes I caused them to dwell.
Thenceforward I am Hammurabi, the mighty king, the favourite of the
great gods. With the might accorded me by Merodach I built a tall
tower with great entrances, whose summits are high like ... at the
head of the canal ' Hammurabi the blessing of the people.' I named
the tower Sinmuballit tower, after the name of my father, my begetter.
The statue of Sinmuballit, my father, my begetter, I set up at the four
quarters of heaven." 1

Other inscriptions record the erection of temples in Borsippa and Erech,
and the reality of his supremacy in Larsa is proved by an inscription
found there, which records his restoration of the temple of the sun-god ;
and contract tablets are dated by the erection and restoration of other
temples. Rings bearing the legend "Palace of Hammurabi" have been
found in the neighbourhood of Bagdad, and presumably indicate the
existence of a royal residence there. A contract tablet refers to the
demolition by the king of two fortresses, possibly in the newly annexed
southern provinces ; and another mentions a destructive flood. The reign
as a whole was prosperous, and that not merely politically, but in those
substantial social conditions which are reflected in the commercial market.
Scanty as our knowledge of the reign of so ancient a king must be, we
have still good reason to believe that the price of land went up in its
course — a sign, no doubt, of growing population and commercial ac-
tivity.2

Hammurabi was succeeded by his son, Samsi-iluna (Samas is god). He
restored six fortresses which his ancestor, Sumula-ilu, had built against the
Elamites ; and the cylinder recording this fact supplies a remarkable con-
firmation of the great list of Babylonian kings. He calls Sumula-ilu " my
great ancestor, my fifth predecessor," 3 while the list shows us exactly four
kings between the two. In this dynasty, after Sumula-ilu, the succession
proceeded constantly from father to son, and the expression here may be
used, as it were genealogically rather than historically. It is evident, how-
ever, that a valuable check on the accuracy of the official chronology
would be supplied, if the kings thought and spoke of themselves popularly
as so many generations off from this or that predecessor. Samsi-iluna de-
scribes himself in inscriptions as the mighty king, king of Babel, and of
the four regions of heaven; and as walking in peace, shepherding the city

1 G.B.A., p. 408; K.B.,l.c.t p. 123.

2 Les Obligations en Droit Egyptien, p. 293.

3 Winckler, K.B.^ iii. i, p. 133.

284 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

and the Four Regions. He dug two canals, and made a golden throne for
the god Urukhi ; he set up colossal golden bulls to the sun and moon
gods in Larsa and Babel, and a gold and silver image to Merodach in
Isagilla, all of which facts are recorded by the contract tablets of his
reign.1

Out of in contract tablets printed by Meissner,2 fifty-eight are more or
less completely and legibly dated. In twenty-five of these the year is
identified by some occurrence, the opening of a canal, a flood, the setting
up of the " throne" of some god, or by the name of some person other
than the reigning king. The names of Rim-sin and Zabu occur once each,
and one deed is witnessed by Sinmuballit before his accession. Fifteen
contracts belong to the reign of Hammurabi, though his name is only
mentioned in eight of them. Seven belong to the reign of Ammizadugga ;
four to that of Ammiditana ; three to that of Samsi-iluna, and one each to
the reigns of Ebisu, or Ibishum, and of Immeru.

As the order of the contracts is frequently to be gathered from their sub-
stance, when a series deals with the affairs of the same family, from father to
son, for two or three generations, it is obvious that the undated historical
events alluded to may be more or less satisfactorily placed by their help.
And a tolerably complete chronological record of the most important
reigns may in time be completed from this source. It has been left to
historians of our own day to insist on the historical importance of such
common facts about the daily life of the people, as political history has
seldom deigned to commemorate. And it is not a little singular that this
one among the earliest chapters of human history, which has been buried
in complete oblivion, since the fall of Nineveh, should prove, when re-
opened, to stand alone among the records of antiquity, in giving as much
prominence to the private affairs of the family and the market-place, as to
those of the court and the battle-field ; and that the fame of the kings
should rest partly upon the number of times they are taken to witness that
justice is about to be done.

Nothing definite is known of the kings belonging to the Second Dynasty,
commonly called of Sisku,3 except that, as already observed, the length
assigned to their reigns seems excessive, while some of their names were
sufficiently famous to be preserved in a list giving Semitic translations of
their sense. The rise of the Assyrian monarchy dates from the latter half
of the period assigned to the Second Dynasty.

2 Beitriige zur Alt-Babylonischen Priziatrecht. Bruno Meissner, 1893.

3 Winckler (Geschichte, p. 67) Uru-zag, which he renders " the shining city," and
takes to be the name of a quarter of Babylon. Another quarter was perhaps called
Shu-anna, and both names were used for the city as a whole, as was the case with the
quarters of Lagash (ante, p. 267). The first Babylonian dynasty is called that of Tintir,
the sacred name of Babylon, and the substitution of the other title would imply a dy-
nastic change, not affecting the capital or the nation.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 285

§ 2. THE THIRD (KASSITE) DYNASTY.

Some of the kings of the Third Dynasty have unmistakably Kassite
names, and the whole dynasty may conveniently be called Kassite or
Kosssean for distinction, though we do not know how it was designated in
the Babylonian list. The Kassites and the Elamites were in much the
same plane of civilization, and it is probable that the former established
themselves in Babylonia in much the same way, and with the same result,
that the Elamites did in Larsa. The kings of the mountains easily van-
quished the pacific city kings of the plain ; and, having taken their place,
were themselves promptly tamed and pacified.

During the period of transition the black-headed people suffered
grievously, and Hommel suggests that a passage in the Babylonian epos,
describing how the god of heaven let loose the war god upon the offend-
ing land, refers to the ravages of the Kassites. Babylon itself was plundered,
and beheld the unaccustomed spectacle of the king at the head of his
troops, brandishing the bow and lifting up the sword. The fire-god,
Ishum, and with him seven other gods of war, swept over the land as far
as Syria itself;1 and, to quote the prophetic narrative of the oracle, "Coast
against coast, lowland against lowland, Assur against Assur, Elam against
Elam, Kossaean against Kosssean, Sutu against Sutu, Kutu against Kutu,
Lullubti against Lullubu, land against land, house against house, man
against man, brother against brother, shall rise up and subdue one another,
till the people of Akkad comes and destroys and subjugates them all."

The mention of Assur makes it improbable that this text should be
earlier than the Third Dynasty, as even in the latter half of the Second
Dynasty the rulers of Assyria bore the title of patesi, not king. The ob-
scure kings of the Second Dynasty no doubt allowed the cities of the plain
and the coast to indulge in petty feuds, and the power of the nations in
the mountains of the east seems to have passed its zenith ; the empire of
Elam began to wane, and until the time of Cyrus no more great conquests
were to proceed thence.

It was not the mission of the black-headed race to impose its laws upon
these turbulent neighbours ; but the land of Akkad was a tempting centre
for any dynasty strong enough to rule all Mesopotamia, and to restrain the
surrounding elements of disorder. That this was the role of the Kassite
kings will appear from their later history, though the first six kings on the
list have left no monuments, with the exception of a short inscription
bearing the name of the first. The next eighteen names are wanting ; but
the seventh king of the dynasty has left an interesting inscription, in which
he mentions his father and grandfather by name, and this piece of piety
now serves to determine his place in the list. In this inscription, of which
an Assyrian translation was preserved in the library of Sardanapalus, he

1 The astronomical work contemplates the possibility of invasion from the west, or a
Hittite conquest of Babylon. Cf. Hommel, p. 346 ff. and p. 419, for references to
untranslated texts, ap. Rawlinson, W.A.L

286 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

calls himself Agu-kak-rime, the son of Urzu-guru-bar, grandson of Adu-
mi-lik, the exalted offshoot of the god Shukumunu (a Kassite deity), the
chosen of Ann and Bel, and Ea and Merodach, Sin and Samas, the mighty
hero of Istar, the heroine among goddesses. A king of counsel and
wisdom, a king of hearing (or listening) and grace ; the brave, mighty in
youth . . . the aboriginal son of the great Agu,1 the brilliant offshoot,
the royal offshoot, a shepherd, a mighty one. " A shepherd of widespread
nations, a brave one ; he who establishes 2 the foundations of his father s
throne, am I." He calls himself further king of the Kassites and Akka-
dians, of the land of Babel, and of the lands of Padan and Alman, king of
the Guti, numerous peoples,3 a king who makes the Four Regions to obey,
a favourite of the great gods.

He obtained the restoration of divine images of Marduk and his wife,
Zarpanit, which had been carried off from Babel into the land of the
Hittites, and spent four talents on dresses for the same gods, to say
nothing of precious stones for their crowns, and furniture and decorations
for their temple. Apart from his successful negotiations with the Hittites,
he does not appear to have claimed any authority over the western coun-
tries ; but he speaks in the same inscription of having sent his own work-
men to the shining mountain, to obtain the sweet-scented cedar and
cypress wood for the great double gates of the temple.4

A very remarkable postscript to this inscription is appended by the
three chiefs of the workpeople employed by the king, who received from
him the gift of a house, field, and garden apiece. These gifts are conse-
crated to the gods Merodach and Zarpanit ; so it is possible that the
chiefs of the works were settled upon sacred land and endowed in the
same way as the priests, only with the duty of looking after the material
rather than the spiritual maintenance of the temple. Any way the grate-
ful operatives proceed with great unction and eloquence to invoke bless-
ings on the king Agu, and curses upon whomsoever shall injure or look
askance upon his records. The benediction is worth reproducing as an
illustration of the theology of the period. " May Anu and Anatu bless
him in heaven, and Bel and Ninlil in the lower world ; may they satisfy
him with the lot of life. May Ea and Damkinna, who live in the great
watery abyss, grant him a life of distant days ; may the goddess Magh (a
name of Istar), the lady of the great mountains, crown him with . . .
May Sin, who illuminates the heavens, grant him seed of the kingdom for
distant days ; may the hero Samas, the lord of heaven and earth, establish
the foundation of the throne of his kingdom for distant days ; may Ea, the
lord of canals, crown him with wisdom ; may Merodach, the lord of canals,
who loves his dynasty, surround him with abundance."

1 Jensen has " the first-born son of the elder Agu."

2 Or, " causes to endure."

3 Cf. Gen. xiv. i, 9. Tidal, king of nations = Goyim.

4 G.B.A., 421 ; K.B.i iii. I. 135-153-

5 Hommel, Gesch., p. 423 ff. Tiele, p. 128. The text is defective, but it seems
agreed that house, field, and grove are bestowed (according to Jensen, tax free) both

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 287

The most notable trait in this whole inscription is the somewhat un-
accustomed insistence on the prolongation of the royal family. Delitzsch,1
in a translation of the same inscription, makes the king call himself a
ruler who " firmly establishes the throne of his father," and it is impossible
not to be reminded by the phrase of the Egyptian theory of succession,
by which a king's throne is established when he associates with himself
upon it the son of a royal mother. The king himself is familiarly called
Agu, and the " great Agu," of whom he calls himself " son from the be-
ginning," must be Agum-amir, the second king of the dynasty, or the
third, if his name should be read Agu-a-shi. The first and third kings of
the dynasty were succeeded by their sons, but the third was not the son of
the second, nor the fifth and sixth of their predecessors. The line of
succession was therefore broken, and the dearth of monuments shows that
the kings before this Agu were not particularly flourishing or powerful.
If the father strengthened his position by marrying the heiress of the
earlier Agu, that would explain both the clause in the inscription and the
security and wealth of the new king.

He speaks of settling many nations in Asnunnak, which Delitzsch takes
to mean that he established Kassite colonies in Southern Babylonia, on
the borders of Elam towards the sea ; i.e. in the old land of Mutbal.
Indeed, it has been proposed to regard Kaldi (Chaldaea) as equivalent to
Kashdi and Kash, the land of the Kassites or Gush. Delitzsch suggests
that the presence of Kassites in Southern Babylonia in the sixteenth
century B.C. would be sufficient to account for the Hebrew conception of
Nimrod — the founder of Erech as well as Nineveh — as a Cushite, and that
the same explanation would account for one of the rivers of Paradise
being described as encompassing the land of Cush.

The date of Agukakrime must be somewhere about 1600 B.C., and the
limitation of his enterprises towards the west may doubtless be explained by
the extension of the Egyptian empire, which the conquests of Thothmes
III. brought up to the very borders of Babylon. Under Agu, Mesopotamia,
in the narrow sense, no doubt enjoyed complete security, independence,
and wealth ; and if, as is probable, there was more real affinity between
the men of Sumer and Akkad and the Kassites than with the Semitic
population, there is nothing strange in the rapidity with which the settled
population assimilated its conquerors. After Agu eighteen kings seem
to have reigned ; but as to fifteen of these, neither their names nor the
duration of their reigns are known. The length of the other three reigns,
but not the kings' names, are preserved in the list. The detailed chron-
ology therefore fails us for a period of about 400 years, and the space with
neither names nor dates extends to 300 years.

Little more than one hundred of these are left entirely blank, for the
synchronous history of Babylonia and Assyria gives the name of Kara-

upon the priests of the gods and upon the " arch-artist " and men of skill employed on
the works.

1 Die Sprache der Kossaer. Appendix A.

288 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

indas as contemporary with Assur-bil-nishi-shu, towards the beginning of
the fifteenth century, and those of six other kings reigning together till
about the end of the fourteenth century, the last of whom was con-
temporary with Salmanasar I. (about 1330 B.C.). Judging from the in-
scriptions, the only important ruler during this period was Kurigalzu,
called by one of his descendants "the unequalled king." Hommel and
Delitzsch suppose that there were two kings of this name ; the first, the
incomparable one, preceding Burnaburias. He is styled " the mighty
king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the Kassu, king
of Kardunias." He forestalled Nabonidus in the attempt to discover the
" foundation stone of lulbar in Agani," 1 which remained concealed from
the days of Naramsin to Nabonidus ; and either he or his namesake built
a fortress, Dur-Kurigalzu, or Kurigalzu's wall, in the neighbourhood of
Bagdad, which was the key to the country of Kardunias.

More important than the doubtful order of the Kassite kings is the fact
that, at the beginning of the fifteenth century at latest, regular diplomatic
intercourse was established between the monarchies of Babylonia and
Assyria, while letters and presents were exchanged between the kings of
both those countries and the rulers of Egypt. In the Cinque cento B.C.,
as we may call it, the comity of nations was scarcely less developed than
in Europe at the close of the Middle Ages. The horizon of kings and
merchants was wide enough to include Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and the whole
basin of the two rivers with the highlands commanding them, a region as
extensive as Western Europe, and probably as far advanced in wealth and
luxury as that was 3,000 years later.

The chief authority for this period is a document commonly called the
synchronous history of Babylonia and Assyria, which appears to be an
abstract of all the treaties and wars, entered into by the two countries, in
reference to some debateable land, presumably on their frontiers. A few
passages from it will serve as a specimen of this kind of literature.

" Karaindas, king of Babylon, and Assurnisisu, king of Assur, made treaties together,
and took an oath together about this territory.

" Busurassur, king of Assur, and Burnaburias, king of Kardunias, negotiated about the
territory, and fixed the boundaries on both sides.

" In the time of Assuruballit,2 king of Assur, the Kassi had revolted from Karahardas,
king of Kardunias, son of Muballitatsirua, daughter of Assuruballit, and had slain him ;
Nazibugas, son of Nobody, they raised to be king over them.

"Assuruballit marched on Kardunias to avenge Karahardas ; he slew Nazibugas, king
of Kardunias ; he made young Kurigalzu, son of Burnaburias, king ; he seated himself on
the throne of his fathers.

" In the time of Belnirari, king of Assur, Kurigalzu the younger was king of Kar-
dunias ; Belnirari fought with him, defeated him, and carried off his camp. From . . .
to Kardunias they halved the fields, they divided the territory, and determined the
boundaries.

" Rammanirari, king of Assur, and Nazimaraddas, king of Kardunias, fought together

1 Schrader, K.B., iii., pt. 2, p. 85.

2 The Tell-el-Amarna tablets show that this king was the son of Assurnadinahi, who
was casually mentioned in an inscription of Asirnasirapal. The same source also shows
that a Babylonian king, X-lim-ma-sin, otherwise unknown, must have reigned just before
or after Karaindas, or else that there was yet another monarchy bordering the Euphrates
in correspondence with Egypt.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 289

in Kar-Istar and Akarsallu. Rammannirari smote Nazimaraddas and defeated him ; he
took his camp and his . . . They fixed the following boundaries for the territory :
their territories from Pilaski on the further bank of the Tigris, and from Armanakarsalu
to Lulumi, and they divided it." l

This is the end of the first column. In the first paragraph it will be
observed that the name of the king of Babylon takes precedence, while
in the second the order is reversed. Burnaburias married the daughter of
an Assyrian king, and the deposition of the son of this marriage by the
Kassites may have been due to jealousy of Assyrian influence. Kurigalzu
II. probably conciliated his countrymen, by taking up arms against his
former patron. These six reigns, with perhaps others not marked by
dealings with Assyria, must have covered the century and a half between
the date of Rammannirari (about the middle of the fourteenth cent. B.C.) and
the conjectural date of Karaindas, about 1470 B.C. An inscription records
the building of a temple by Karaindas, and Kurigalzu set up a statue of
Merodach in the town bearing his name. He also built a zigurrat there,
and restored one of the ancient temples of Ur, works which imply a toler-
ably prosperous reign. Another king, Sagasaltiburias, who flourished
eight hundred years before Nabonidus, also founded a temple of sufficient
importance to be restored by that pious prince.

The name Kardunias, now commonly used for Babylon, is said to be
half Kassite, half Sumero-Semitic, and to mean the "garden of the lord of
the lands." 2 Throughout this period the two powers seem to have been
equally matched ; the chronicle mentions a majority of Assyrian victories,
but as it was edited for an Assyrian king, the defeats may have been omitted.
Delitzsch supposes Assyria to have taken up arms originally to resist
attempted Kassite encroachments. At some uncertain date, a king of
Babylon appealed to Assyria for help, on the strength of similar help given
by his father to the Assyrian king's predecessor ; and Senacherib boasts of
carrying off from Babylon a seal, which had been brought there as booty
six hundred years before. The king who lost it nevertheless claimed the
title of king of Sumer and Akkad, and on the whole the frontiers of
Assyria seemed to have advanced, though the partition effected in the
reign of Rammannirari implies that up to that time, the land east of the
Tigris, between the'Upper and the Lower Zab, was considered to belong to
Babylon.

Rammannirari, king of Assyria, in an inscription of his own,3 calls him-
self the son of Pudil, the grandson of Belnirari, and great-grandson of
Assuruballit, and rehearses the achievements of his ancestors. He boasts
that they all enlarged the borders of the kingdom, and we can infer in what
direction, when lie adds that his grandfather overthrew the people of
the Kassi, and that he himself founded anew their ruined cities. This

1 Keilinschriftliche Bibliothek. Edited by E. Schrader. Vol. i. p. ioc. Transla-
tion by F. E. Peiser and Hugo Winckler.

2 The etymology is perhaps doubtful, but iash is Kassite for "land." Winckler, Gesch.t

'3 K.B.,\. p. 6.
P.C. T

29o ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

interesting inscription was set up before the two gates, " Invocation of the
god of the land," and " The Divine Judges." It closes with a typical
appeal to later ages.

If, when these foundations are grown old and decay, a later prince re-
pairs their injuries and sets up the tablet and the founder's name in its
place again, Assur will hear his prayers ; but " whosoever defaces the name
and writes his own in its place or takes away my tablets to destroy it, casts
it into the stream, bums it with fire, sinks it in water, or covers it with
dust, or brings or sets it in an unseen place, or any evil enemy who sends
another and causes it to be carried away, Assur, the exalted god who
dwells in Iharsagkurkura, Anu, Bel, Ea and Istar, the great gods, the
spirits of heaven and the spirits of earth shall smite him with their mighty
hands and curse him with an evil curse, and destroy his name, his seed,
his power, and his family in the land ; the destruction of his land and of
his people shall come from their mouth. Ramman shall visit him with an
evil rainstorm, and send floods, hurricane, rebellion, destruction, storm
and stress, hunger and dearth into his land, and with an evil eye turn its
fields into fallows, and its cities into heaps of ruins."

These Assyrian kings are rather exacting in their demands upon posterity.
The great inscription of Tiglath-Pileser explains what Rammannirari
means by an (t unseen place," to which he objects nearly as strongly as
to the destruction of his monuments. Tiglath-Pileser includes in his
imprecations any one who " stores them away in a (?) library, a place
where people cannot see them1 like. ..." Evidently there was
some danger already (noo B.C.) of ancient tablets falling into the hands of
private collectors, and so passing into oblivion ; and the kings were not
satisfied with a place in the memory of antiquarians or historians, they
demanded to have their commemorative tablets preserved in as public a
place as those where they were first erected, so that all the people in passing
by might be reminded of their name and achievements.

An Assyrian inscription names Karaburias as reigning in Babylon con-
temporaneously with a king whose name is missing, but who is supposed
to be Salmanasar I. (perhaps 1330-1310 B.C.). Salmanasar I. is the son and
successor of Rammannirari, so Karaburias may be the immediate successor
of Nazimarraddas, in which case seven reigns in succession are accounted

1 Now that time's revolutions have left their cities desolate, we must hope that the
vengeance of the great gods Ramman and Anu may concentrate itself upon those who
hinder excavations, or who hoard undeciphered tablets in private libraries ; and spare the
•directors of such museums as give them due publicity, with explanatory tickets, in
accessible cases, and photograph, print and translate them with exemplary expedition ; to
say nothing of the meritorious explorers, whose fevered slumbers may well be haunted by
the varied and picturesque curses they unearth. Thus Professor Hilprecht is tempted to
lay the blame of the delay in his publication, on " the rage of En-lil, lord of the demons,
who set loose against the expedition all the Igigi and Annunnaki ; " though he is not
without hopes that such rage may abate now that the inscriptions which proclaim the
glory of the great Bel " lord of lands " have seen the light in America, or may be converted
into such blessings as King Nazi-Maruttash invokes : " to hear his prayer, to grant his
•supplication, to accept his sigh, to preserve his life, to lengthen his days ! " It is
evidently difficult to disbelieve in gods who are sworn by with so much eloquence and
fervour.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 291

for. Salmanasar and his son Tiglatadar call themselves kings of nations,
and the latter also claimed authority over the land of Kardunias. The
seal bearing his titles was, however, carried off to Babylon by some " evil
enemy," notwithstanding the customary imprecations, and remained there
till the conquest of Senacherib. Marduk-abal-iddin (first half of twelfth
century B.C.), who speaks of Kurigalzu, the "unequalled," as his ancestor,
also names another of his predecessors, Irba-Marduk, whom he styles king
of Sumer and Akkad, and who may have been the captor of Tiglatadar's
seal.1

As Tiele observes,3 Babylonia was not at this time really subjugated by
Assyria, only superseded in its aspirations after the control of the Four
Regions. About the beginning of the twelfth century there was war again be-
tween the two powers, when Belkudorosor was king of Assyria, and a king
whose name begins with Ramman, reigned over Babylon ; the latter was slain,
but the defeat was not accepted as final. There are thus three kings out
of eleven, between Karaburias and Marduk-abal-iddin, of whom something
is known, beyond the fact that their united reigns occupied about a century
and a quarter. A boundary stone, bearing the name and portrait of the
former king, is now at the British Museum ; it records the gift of a piece
of land by the king, and is interesting because it gives the cardinal points
in the same way as the tablet quoted (sup. p. 265) ; at least upper and
lower are used for west and east. The other boundaries described are the
river Tigris and neighbouring houses, and then the land of such and such
a " town." The successor of Marduk, Zama-sum-iddin, was attacked by
Assurdanan, who carried off spoil to Assyria, and was the great-grandfather
of Tiglath-Pileser I., and with the short reign of the next king the Kassite
Dynasty comes to an end, in the middle of the twelfth century B.C.

This Kassite Dynasty was contemporary with the rise of Assyria as a
powerful kingdom, and with the whole of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt
and with the kings of the Nineteenth, at least down to Rameses III. The
kingdom of the Hittites also reached its greatest strength during the same
period, and a number of small kingdoms in Syria and Palestine had
fortified capitals, able, like Kadesh and Megiddo, to make a creditable
resistance even to the armies of an Egyptian conqueror. Another kingdom
of some importance, called Mitani, is believed to have lain to the east of
the Euphrates, where that stream borders the kingdom of Carchemish,
so that it would itself be surrounded on three sides by the great river,
while the Balih may have served as its eastern limit. This region, rather
than Babylonia proper, must be the Naharina of the Egyptian inscriptions,
and the Asiatic campaigns of Thothmes I. probably did not extend beyond
this point. Thothmes III, however, counts among the taxes levied from
the land of the Rutennu, "the tribute of the king of Assur," and scarabs
bearing the name both of Thothmes III. and Amenophis III. were dis-

1 This king's name has also been preserved upon a thirty -mina weight in the form of
a duck.

a Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte, i. p. 143.

292 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

covered by Layard in his Assyrian excavations. The kingdoms of Syria
and the Hittites must have suffered serious defeats and despoilments, but
it may be doubted whether even Thothmes III. attempted much more than
a military promenade, or a demonstration in force to the east of the
Euphrates. And, if so, the kingdoms of Northern Mesopotamia might
consider that they were only treating for peace with a great power too far
off to be dangerous, by sending presents which the Egyptians chose to
regard, as tribute.

Perhaps the most startling and interesting of the many discoveries made
in the present generation is that of the correspondence between the kings
of Babylon and Mitani and the kings of Egypt in the fifteenth century B.C.
In the winter of 1887-1888, at Tell-el-Amarna, the capital of the heretical
Pharaoh, Amenophis IV., a number of clay tablets bearing cuneiform
inscriptions were discovered. Among them were letters from Asiatic kings
to two kings of Egypt, Nimmuriya— Neb-ma-ra (Amenophis III.) and Nap-
khururiya = Nofer-kheperu-Ra (Amenophis IV.). From a broken tablet it
appears that the father of the Egyptian king had sent " much gold " to the
writer's father (or ancestor), Kurigalzu, so that this great monarch may
have lived so shortly before Karaindas, as to have been in correspondence
with the same king of Egypt.

The following letter explains itself : " Speak thus to Naphururia, king of
Egypt, my brother. Purrapurias, king of Kardunias, is thy brother. It is
well with me. Much good be with thee, and thy land, thy house, thy
wives, thy sons, thy nobles, thy horses, and thy chariots of war. As afore-
time thou and my father kept friendship together, so now, thou and I.
.- . . What thou desirest from my land write me, and it shall be brought
thee ; and what I desire out of thy land, I will write to thee and it shall
be brought me. I and my brother have bound ourselves together in
friendship, and have spoken in this wise : we will be friendly towards each
other for evermore."

There can be no doubt as to the identity of the writer of this letter
with Burnaburias, the son of Karaindas, and the date of Amenophis IV.
is thus shown to be about the middle of the fifteenth century B.C.

There are only eight letters- from Babylon in the Tell-el-Amarna col-
lection, from a king — whose name read1 Elish-kul-lim-ma-sin, may be
identical with the Kallima-Sin found by Hilprecht — and from Burnaburias;
in another of these the latter complains to the Egyptian king, as lord of
Palestine, of the murder of Babylonians in Akko.

There is a letter from Assur-u-ballit, the king of Assyria, the ''great
king," who expresses satisfaction at the arrival of messengers from Egypt,
and announces that he has sent a royal chariot and two white horses and
a seal as a token of friendship ; he observes diplomatically that when his
father, Assurnadinahi, sent to Egypt, twenty talents of gold were brought
back, and the same return was made to the king of Hannirabbat when he
wrote to Amenophis III. After this hint he concludes: " Write what
1 By Winckler, GescJi., p. 89.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 293

thou desirest, and thy messenger shall bring it thee. The lands of both
of us are large; our messengers shall go (backwards and forwards between
them)." Another letter, as yet untranslated, is from the king of Alasia,
probably in Syria, to the king of Egypt, and another from the king of
Arsapi (? Reseph) is written in an unknown language supposed to be
Hittite.

The largest collection of letters, however, is that from Mitani. The
king of this country, Tushratta by name, like his brother of Assyria, calls
himself the great king, and he addresses Amenophis III. as his brother
and son-in-law, " whom he loves and who loves him," an Egyptian for-
mula, always used by relations and presumably translated by the Mitani
dragoman in imitation of the letters received from Egypt. Apparently,
.Thothmes III. had begun by exacting tribute from the king of Mitani, but
afterwards, when his troops were no longer on the spot to enforce the
claim, made or accepted overtures of friendship. Thothmes is referred
to as Mimmuria (Men-keper-ra), and Tushratta promises to continue the
friendship established with him to his son. He acknowledges the receipt
of presents from Amenophis, and the return of articles belonging to his
father, which must have been captured by Thothmes before the alliance
began. He writes in Assyrian and in his own language, of which four
hundred lines are thus preserved. Tushratta's reign must have been long
if he was contemporary with both Thothmes III., Amenophis III., and
the latter's son, Amenophis IV. ; and there was certainly some special
connection between him and the famous queen Tii, the foreign mother
of Amenophis, who has been credited with seducing him into the here-
tical worship of the sun's disk, whence his other name of Khuenaten.

In an Egyptian text the parents of this princess are called Juao and
Thuao, otherwise it would be natural to suppose that she was the daughter
of Tushratta. Amenophis .IV., as well as his father, is called the son-in-
law of the Mitani, king, and there is a long letter addressed to him, con-
sisting partly of complaints that the latter's messengers were detained, and
not protected on their journeys, so that '; his brother's heart was angered."
The usual introduction includes special greetings to the king's mother,
Teie, and to his wife, Saka-kansak, the writer's daughter; and the letter
ends: "As to the frequent intercourse which I had with thy father, Teie,
thy mother, knows the facts, and after Teie, thy mother, thou knowest
them, and what, he said to thee. As thy father was friendly with me, so
now, O my brother, thou art friendly again with me, and the contrary
thereunto, O my brother, no one indeed listens to." l

The hostility shown in Egypt to Amenophis IV., which resulted in the
fall of his house and the rise of the Nineteenth Dynasty, has been ac-
counted for before, by the native theory of , his illegitimacy as a ruler, since
his mother was not a member of the Egyptian royal family. Thothmes

1 P.S.B.A., 1889, p. 389. This letter is practically decisive as to the Asiatic origin of
the lady who, as queen consort, and queen mother, appears so often on the Egyptian
monuments.

294 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

counts kings' daughters among the spoil or tribute he carried off, and
there was nothing to prevent the kings of Egypt from receiving any num-
ber of foreign princesses in their harem, but Tii was the only lady of this
class who held the rank of queen mother, and her promotion to it was
resented. While this was the view taken of the status of foreign princesses
in Egypt, naturally the Egyptian kings were not prepared to give their
own daughters in marriage to aliens.

A king of Babylon, part of whose letter is preserved, resented this claim
to superiority ; he had sent to demand a daughter of the king of Egypt
in marriage, and had been told that from all time it had been the custom
not to give them away (to foreigners). This appears to him an excuse ;
the king is master, and if he chose to give his daughter, who could object?
if he does not choose, he disregards the claims of brotherhood and friend-
ship, and the Babylonian king will not send his own daughter to Egypt
unless there is to be reciprocity in this respect. If the Egyptian king will
send him three thousand talents of gold, he will have it wrought into the
articles desired and return it without deduction, but he will not give his
daughter in marriage. It is curious that the Babylonians, who seem by
these letters to have been always short of gold, should have excelled the
Egyptians, with whom it was abundant, so much in skill that it was worth
while for the metal to be sent to them for working up.

The Babylonian king is willing to give his daughter, Irtabi, in marriage,
if Pharaoh will send and fetch her; but he complains, like Tushratta, that,
instead of his envoys being sent back as formerly, with handsome presents
after a few days, they had been detained five years, and then dismissed
with a paltry thirty mina of gold. Another letter shows that Irtabi was
the king's second daughter, and that there was some trouble with Ameno-
phis III. about her dowry. An inferior Syrian prince was in the habit of
sending presents by the Egyptian couriers, who passed through his
country on their return from the land of the Hittites; he addresses the
Egyptian king as his father, and echoes the prayers of his superiors for
gold.

A king, Subbi-kuzki, the name of whose country is illegible, writes a
rather long letter to Amenophis IV. about the alliance established by
desire of the latter's father, and about presents, in relation to which the
Egyptian king had again given cause for complaint. Amenophis III.
kept up by diplomacy the relations opened by Thothmes at the point of
the sword, and it is strange that Amenophis IV., while incurring unpopu-
larity at home by his foreign tastes, should yet have been less careful than
his father to retain the good will of the Asiatic princes with whom he
corresponded. There are also letters from Tarchundarash, king of Arzapi,
and from some other quarter, showing the script to have been adopted
for many languages and countries.

The Tell-el-Amarna tablets include a number of letters and reports
from officers employed in Syria and those regions which recognised the
protectorate of Egypt ; and the degree of skill possessed by their scribes

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 295

in the use of cuneiforms supplies a measure of the range of Babylonian
influence. Certain of the Egyptian scribes were evidently told off to
master the diplomatic language, the French of the Old World ; and touches
of Egyptian ink upon the tablets, as well as the endorsement of some as
copies, show that the original letters were used as reading books and
models by students.1

Towards the close of the fourteenth century, when Babylonia and
Assyria were occupied with their boundary disputes, Egypt also had
domestic troubles which must have caused her hold on Syria to be re-
laxed. The kingdom of the Hittites profited by the interval, and the
cities of Palestine and Phoenicia also increased in wealth and consequence,
while the monarchy of Tushratta seems to have sunk into insignificance.
At any rate, when Egypt again took the aggressive under Seti I. and
Rameses II., her armies found feats enough to boast of in the sieges of
Askelon and Kadesh, and in repeated campaigns against the Hittites.
Their conquests were not pushed beyond the Euphrates, and they did not
come in collision with the growing power of Assyria. Even Rameses III.,
if he pushed his revenge on " the peoples of the sea," mentioned in his
inscriptions as far as the seats they occupied then, will have done so by
entering Asia Minor, not by traversing Naharina.

This attack on Egypt was part of a general movement of population,
like that which carried the Etruscans to Italy and the Iberians to Spain.
There was a dispersion of energetic and improvable stocks, derived from
the mountains of the Caucasus and Northern Armenia, which was not
unlike, in its effects on the world's history, to that movement which
brought the ancestors of Egyptians, Akkadians, and Chinese from another
highland cradle, further south and east. We have seen how the Kassites
succeeded the Elamites as the great military power of the range com-
manding the Tigris, and after the Kassite power was merged in that of a
pacific Babylonia, the Assyrian kings found foemen worthy of their steel
in the princes of the Nairi land round the lakes Van and Urmia.

§^3. OBSCURE DYNASTIES (FOURTH TO NINTH) CONTEMPORARY
WITH RISING POWER OF ASSYRIA.

The Fourth Babylonian Dynasty bears the name of Pasi. All the kings
known to have belonged to it have names beginning either with Nebo or
Marduk. Assurisi, the king of Assyria who succeeded Assurdanan, was at
war with one Nabuchodorosor; and as Assurdanan was contemporary with
the last but one of the Kassite dynasty, Nabuchodorosor was probably
not later than the third of the Pasi kings, and was succeeded by Bel-nadin-
apli.2

1 See for the Tell-el-Amarna tablets generally Erman and Schrader, Sitzimgsberichte d.
konig. Pr. Akad. d. Wissenschaften, May, 1888, and Hugo Winckler, #., "Dec. 1888.
Also Sayce, P.S.B.A., 1888, p. 488, 1889, p. 326, and P. A. J. Delattre, #., 1890, p.
127. Rec. of the Past, 2nd series, vol. v. p. 54. H. Winckler, Ceschichte Bab. und Ass.,
p. 157 ff., and M. J. Halevy, Journ. As., 1890, pp. 298, 402 ; 1891, pp. 87, 2O2 ; 1892,
pp. 270, 499; t'6.t vol. xx. p. 233. 2 Z.A., viii. 2, p. 221..

•2 96 .' ANCIENT BAB YL ONI A.

Tiglath-Pileser (arc. noo), according to the synchronous history, claimed
to have defeated the king of Babylon, Marduknadinahi, and to have con-
quered Babylon, Sippara, and other .principal towns, together with their
fortresses. Senacherib. however, claims to have recovered from Babylon
the gods of an Assyrian city, captured by this king in 1113 B.C.,1 so that the
chronicle is convicted of an Assyrian bias, even supposing the honours of
war to have been divided. The fact that Tiglath-Pileser never calls him-
self king of Sumer and Akkad is conclusive as to the continued independ-
ence of Babylonia.

Tiglath-Pileser was succeeded by his son, Assurbelkala, in whose reign
peace and friendship prevailed between Babylon and Assyria, notwith-
standing a popular revolution in the former country which substituted a
man of unknown origin, Ramman-apal-iddin, for Marduk-sapikullat. The
Assyrian king transferred his friendship to the new sovereign and married
his daughter, and a fragmentary sentence suggests that friendly, or perhaps
commercial, intercourse between the peoples of the two kingdoms was
now established. Assurbelkala was succeeded by another son of Tiglath-
Pileser, and after this the history of the two countries is a blank for over
one hundred years. It is during this interval that the Twenty-second
Dynasty of Egypt, whose kings bear Assyrian names, came into power ; but
the silence of the Assyrian monuments is conclusive against the theory of
an Assyrian conquest of Egypt at this time. A powerful family of Semitic
descent must have settled in Northern Egypt, the favourite resort of
political refugees from Syria, Edom, and Palestine;2 naturalized descend-
ants of this family, in the fourth generation, married Egyptian princesses,
and so obtained a colourable right to the throne, while their origin may
have contributed to the frequency of appeals to Egypt for help, and to the
intervention of Shishak in the feud between Israel and Judah.

Without aspiring to the conquest of the world, kings of the Third (Baby-
lonian) Dynasty called themselves kings of the Kossoeans and the Akka-
dians, and the period following this is probably fairly described by De
litzsch as "Semitic-Kosscean." As late as the ninth century, Assurnasirpal
speaks of Babylonia as the land of the Kassi ; names of private persons are
frequently Kassite down to Nebuchadnezzar, and it is common for a
father and son to bear respectively Semitic and Kassite names. Babylonia
in the eleventh and tenth centuries was more prosperous than Assyria,
where rival kings reigned, and even the immediate predecessors of Assur-
nasirpal did so little for the restoration of the monarchy, that he found Caleh
in ruins, and the country so insecure, that he erected a fortress for its
protection, as if Assyria had been constrained to content herself with the
right bank of the Tigris.

It is this cessation of aggressions from the east, that Tiele thinks

allowed the kingdom of David and Solomon, as well as that of the Hittites,

to increase rapidly in wealth and importance, while the cosmopolitanism

of Solomon's harem reproduces in small that of the preceding Pharaohs.

1 Bezold, K.B., ii. p. 119. 2 Cf. i Kings xi. 17, 40.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 297

Owing no doubt to dynastic disturbances, the eleven kings of the Pasi
dynasty only reigned in all for seventy-two years. The Fifth Dynasty, of
the country of the sea, reigned for twenty-three years towards the middle
of the eleventh century. The fifth column of a Babylonian chronicle,1 of
which the invaluable beginning is, alas ! wanting, tells that the first king
of this dynasty was a " son of Irba-Sin, a man from the dynasty of Damik-
Marduk:" he reigned seventeen years, was murdered, and buried in the
palace of Sargon. The mention of this unknown dynasty serves as a re-
minder that a number of small principalities may always, as in the earliest
times, have surrounded the line of kings ruling, or claiming to rule, over
Sumer and Akkad. The second king, " la-mukin-sumi, king of Kardunias,
son of Hasmar, reigned three months and was buried in the palace of
Hasmar ; " and the dynasty closed with the six years' reign of Kassu-nadin-
ahi, son of Sippai. Three kings, sons of Bazi, reigned for twenty years,
and then for six years an Eiamite, who was buried in the palace of
Sargon.

Unfortunately at this point the chronicle ends, and the list of kings also
is interrupted. There is a space at the bottom of the third column and
another at the top of the fourth, broken away where the names of twelve
or thirteen kings may have been. There must have been two dynasties in
the interval, as after the four names following the gap we read "31
Dynasty of Babylon." Elsewhere the formula is " 368 XI kings of Dynasty
Sisku " or whatever it may be, the years of all the reigns and the number of
the kings being stated in succession. It has therefore been debated whether
thirty-one years or thirty-one reigns are meant, and if, as seems most
probable, thirty-one years are to be understood, this dynasty of Babel
would begin about 762 B.C. with the predecessor of Nabu-sumiskum,2 and
include about five reigns, leaving twelve to fill the space from the end of
the eleventh century to the beginning of the eighth, or something between
200 and 250 years.

The synchronous chronicle begins again with the reign of the Assyrian
king Rammannirari II., about 900 B.C. This prince, a son of Assurdan II.
and grandson of Tiglath-Pileser II., fought with Samasmudammik, king of
Kardunias, and captured his chariots; the defeated king was slain and
succeeded by Nabusumiskum I., with whom Rammannirari first fought and
then exchanged daughters, made peace, fixed the boundaries, and restored
the intercourse between the people of the two countries. Rammannirari
was succeeded about 890 B.C. by his son Tiglat-adar II. , and three years
before that another chronological authority becomes available, in a list of
Assyrian eponyms, which is almost complete for two hundred years, and
from 817 onwards is confirmed and supplemented by another version
giving the campaigns or other notable events of each year. Assurnasirpal,
son of Tiglat-adar, reigned from 883 to 859, and has left the most copious

* K.B., ii. p. 273.

- He must be the second of the name, as one was contemporary with Rammannirari

298 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

inscriptions regarding his campaigns, his hunting expeditions, and his
buildings and canals.1

His empire extended further than that of Tiglath-Pileser, but the story
of his wars can certainly have no place in a history of civilization, for the
savagery of his vengeance, and the complacency with which he describes
his savagery, exceed anything to be met with among the first domestic
race. Like his father and Tiglath-Pileser, he penetrated to the sources of
the Supnat, an eastern branch of the Upper Tigris. If he did not actually
traverse all the country, from this spot and the Eastern Euphrates, to Lake
Urmia and the Lower Zab, he received from all of it such submission or
tribute as justified him in counting it as part of his empire. The whole of
Northern Mesopotamia west of Assur and Nineveh was subdued, including
the ancient kingdom of Mitani, now called Bit-adini, and the country be-
tween the Euphrates and the Chaboras. In the latter region he encoun-
tered some of the most formidable resistance recorded in his annals. The
king of Suhi, lying on both sides of this reach of the Euphrates, had
appealed to Babylon for assistance, and an auxiliary troop of Kassites was
sent in response. He made a stand at Suru, a fortress on the left of the
Euphrates, but was totally defeated and the brother of the Babylonian
king was taken prisoner.

It is of this campaign that Assurnasirpal says to Assur : " The fear of my
lordship penetrated to Kardunias ; the superiority of my arms overthrew
Kaldu ; I poured out terror over the mountains by the side of the Eu-
phrates." But with the creditable veracity of old-world bulletins, he does
not profess to have conquered or even to have invaded Babylon. His
crowning achievement was a military promenade through the country of
the Hittites to Lebanon and the Mediterranean. It may be that these
countries thought Assyria, as Assyria and Mitani had thought Egypt, too-
far off to be oppressive, though dangerous at the moment of an armed
approach ; any way, they hastened to offer acceptable presents, which the
Assyrian monarch counted as tribute. The wealth of the Hittites, as
shown by their offerings, must have been very great.

Caleh, the modern Nimroud, was the favourite residence of this king,
and for its benefit he made a canal, from the Upper Zab, named it the
" Stream of fruitfulness," and planted trees along its bank.

Assurnasirpal was succeeded by his son Salmanasar II. (860-825 B.C.),
another warlike prince, who occupied himself much with campaigns in
Urardhi,2 the modern Armenia, and Hubuschia, the country about the
upper course of the Upper Zab. The extent of Assyrian influence in
Armenia may be measured by the fact that, throughout the ninth century.
Armenian inscriptions are written in the Assyrian language and character,
Still more formidable opposition to Salmanasar's authority came from the
west, where a number of princes, under the leadership of Sangar, king of
Carchemish, allied themselves against him, and after the northern coali-

1 E. Schrader, K.B., i. 51-129.

2 The name is connected with Ararat. For his inscriptions, see A'.Z?., i. p. 129-175,.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 299

tion of Hittites, Cilicians, and their neighbours was defeated, Hamath and
Damascus, which had become independent of the Hittite kingdom, headed
a new league against the Assyrians ; and, though Hazael was besieged in
Damascus, and the surrounding country ravaged, in 842, it does not seem
to have fallen. Tyre and Sidon, however, brought tribute, as did Jaua the
son of Humri,1 but on the withdrawal of his troops, revolts broke out
again in Northern Syria, visited with the usual ferocious chastisements. In
849 B.C. Hadadezer of Damascus is mentioned as leading a confederation of
twelve Hittite kings against the Assyrians, and the twelve kings of the coast
mentioned in an inscription of Esarhaddon 2 may be taken as indicating
some kind of constitutional partition.

It is curious that the intercourse between Assyria and Babylonia always
seems to have been most friendly when the latter country was disturbed by
dynastic quarrels. Down to 852 B.C. Salmanasar was on friendly terms
with the king of Babylon, Nabupaliddin. According to Schrader's render-
ing of the synchronous history, Nabupaliddin was deposed by his subjects
in favour of his son Marduknadinsum ; but another son, Mardukbelusate,
rebelled against his brother, and the land was divided betwen them, till
Salmanasar came to the assistance of the former, and slew his rival and
the rebel following. He then offered sacrifice in Babylonian cities, and
the boundaries of the two empires were again settled by treaty.

All through this period, during which all we know of the history of Baby-
lonia is derived from the records of Assyria, the kingdom must have been
both prosperous and powerful, since the most ambitious of Assyrian con-
querors, who counted all the kingdoms from the mountains of Media to
the Mediterranean Sea among their tributaries, never presumed to think of
Babylon as a possible subject. For about four centuries after the close of
the Kassite dynasty, the Kassite-Akkadian kingdom of Kardunias probably
combined a full measure of material prosperity with political obscurity.
Southern Babylonia, or Chaldsea, the land of the Kaldu, where Elamite-
Sumerian influence had been strongest in the past, included a varying
number of independent cities or polities, while the people of the sea shore
differed somewhat from both. The Sixth Babylonian Dynasty was founded
by an enterprising adventurer from this last quarter, like the Merodach
Baladan of the eighth century. But Chaldsea was so far independent of
Kardunias, that Assyrian kings, like Salmanasar, could attack its cities
without prejudice to their friendship with Babylon.

1 I.e. Jehu, the son of Omri. In earlier inscriptions, Palestine is frequently called
" Bit Humri "—the land of Omri— and the expression used here only indicates that the
Assyrians were not aware of any change of dynasty in Israel. In general they describe
foreign princes as " son of" such a person, meaning member of the reigning house called
after him. The book of Kings does not give any idea of the importance of the reign of
Omri, indicated by this Assyrian usage ; but the latter is justified by the prophet Micah's.
reference (vi. 6) to " the statutes of Omri," by the fact that he founded a new capital,
and that his son Ahab defeated the king of Damascus, — a city which sometimes defied
Assyria itself, — and made a covenant with him, securing what may be called " a most
favoured nation clause " for Israel.

2 K.B., ii. p. 149.

300 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

Salmanasar's reign was long as well as prosperous. At the end of thirty
years a religious festival was celebrated, and the king appeared, for the
second time, as Eponym of the year. Tiele compares this kind of jubilee
to the Egyptian feast of the united kingdom, held, likewise, after the dura-
tion of a reign for thirty years ; and both ceremonies are conclusive against
a high average duration of reigns. A thirty years' anniversary was cele-
brated as something exceptionally fortunate, as a fifty years' anniversary is
celebrated now ; but if the average of the kings' reigns was thirty-three years,1
or even twenty-five, evidently there would be nothing noteworthy in the
thirtieth year. Salmanasar's latter years were troubled by the insurrection
of one of his sons ; and the same cause contributed to give a disturbed
character to the reign of his successor, Samsi-Ramman (825-812 B.C.).
Babylonia, perhaps, assisted or sympathised with the pretender ; any way,
Samsiramman's fourth campaign was directed against Akkad. Marduk-
balat-suikbi, the king of Babylonia, allied himself with the Southern
Aramaeans, the Chaldseans, and the Elamites in taking the offensive, and,
though the victory was claimed by Assyria, her strength was taken up in
the struggle, so that Syria and Phoenicia were left to themselves, though
encounters with the princes of Media and Persia (the Madai and Parsuas)
become increasingly frequent and serious.

The list of eponyms, with events of each year, begins in this king's reign,
and the seven entries referring to it may be quoted as a specimen of the
documents upon which, no doubt, the royal annalists had to rely for past
history and chronology.

817. Assur-baniai-usur . . . To the land of Til(?)li.

8 1 6. Sar-pati-bil, of Nisibis. To the land Zarati.

815. Bil-balatu of . . . nu, to Diri. The great god goes to Diri.

814. Musiknis, of the Kirruri country. To the land Ih-sa-na.

813. Nergal, of theSallat (?) country. To the land of Chaldsea.

812. Samas-kumua, of the Arbacha country. To Babylon.

8 IT. Bel-kala-sabat, of Mazamua. In the country.2

The latter entry means that the king stayed at home, and that there was
no campaign. It is not known what the third entry refers to, though it is
plain that some important image of an important god was removed to new
quarters. It will be noticed that the Limu or eponyms are sometimes de-
scribed by their city and at others by their province or country ; the same
office was also held by royal functionaries, like the Tartan, or the captain
of the palace guard. It is supposed that some governorships carried with
them the right of serving as Limu, an office which must have been one
of dignity, as the kings always fill it once in their reign ; but the history of
the institution is obscure.

Rammannirari III. (811-783) set himself to recover the conquests of his
grandfather by the Mediterranean, and in his fourth year an expedition by
sea was undertaken, it is supposed to Cyprus. He boasts of having received

1 As assumed by Brugsch after Herodotus.

2 K.B.) i. p. 209.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 301

tribute from the Chaldreans, and of having sacrificed to the gods of Babel,
Borsippa, and Kutha in their respective cities. Four of his campaigns,
however, were directed against Hubuschia, and eight against the Medes ;
Armenia was thus left comparatively to itself, with results that made them-
selves felt in the following reigns. The worship of Nebo was apparently
introduced into Assyria at this time, and names compounded with that of
the god, which were hitherto almost, or quite unknown, become as common
as in Babylon. A governor of Caleh was the chief promoter of the new
cultus, and set up statues of the god in honour of the king, and more
especially of " his mistress, the lady of the palace, Sammuramat."

This Semiramis is conjectured to be a Babylonian princess, probably the
queen mother, and possibly queen regent, as Rammannirari ascended the
throne young. Queens are unknown in Assyria, and the kings never men-
tion their mothers' or their wives' names, as is commonly done in Baby-
lonia,1 where also queens reigned in their own right. Whether as queen
regent or queen consort, Sammuramat must have been a personage of con-
siderable influence in the realm for the courtier-like votary of Nebo to risk
the charge of heresy which might have been brought, in the land of Assur,
against his inscription : " Set thy trust in Nebo, and thou wilt trust no other
god."2 'The innovation is like that associated in Egypt with the king's es-
tablishment of a queen from Mesopotamia ; and the general tendency of
" strange Women " to introduce strange worships in Palestine may be con-
nected with the independence of the sex, as well as with its religiosity.3 To
account for the Greek legends about a queen Semiramis, we must suppose
Sammuramat to have occupied a conspicuous place in popular imagination.
But as Greek and Hebrew traditions respecting Assyria only begin with
Tiglath-Pileser III. in the eighth century, her place is still rather before the
beginning of well-known history; and so her association with an eponymous
" Ninus," and the confusion of her legend with that of Istar, is not incom-
prehensible.4

Rammannirari III., and his immediate successors, Salmanasar and Assur-
dan III., and Assurnirari II., were contemporary with the greatest develop-
ment of the Armenian monarchy. The ancient kingdom of Armenia is
always called Urardhu or Arardu, by the Assyrians, and this word is taken
to be identical both with the name of Ararat and of the Alarodians of
Herodotus. The native name of the country was Biaina, which survives

1 The opposite usage in the Hebrew Scriptures may be taken as an indication of the
extent to which Syrian usage approximated to that of Sunier and Akkad, rather than
to that of the later Semitic stock. .

2 K.B., i. p. 193.

3 Cf. the contrary European practice which leaves the religion of certain princesses in
abeyance till the confession of their future consort is determined.

4 An inscription of Semiramis, said to have been found by Alexander, has a kind of
interest, as showing that Assyrian tradition borrowed its ideals from the Sargon legend.
The queen is represented as saying : " I governed the kingdom of Ninus, which reaches
on the west to the river Hinarnan, on the south to the lands of incense and myrrh, on
the north to the Salu and Sogdians. Before me no Assyrian had beheld the sea. I saw
four of them lying so far asunder that no man had beheld them." (Maspero, Hist., Germ,
tr.;, p. ,276.) ;

302 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

in that of Lake Van, and the city of the same name ; but the original name
of the latter was Dhuspas, whence Western writers get the name of Tosp.
When the Assyrian inscriptions themselves are silent about Urardhu, the
date of Armenian kings, mentioned in the Vannic inscriptions, can still be
conjectured by comparing the references in them to the kingdoms of the
Hittites and the Milidians, with similar references by the Assyrian kings
whose names are known.

In 857 and 845 B.C. Shalmaneser II. was at war with an Armenian king,
Arame ; and in 833 a general of his defeated a king Sarduris, who is doubt-
less the same as Sarduris I., the son of Luitipris, and author of two inscrip-
tions in Assyrian. For something like a century after the accession of this
king, we hear little of Armenia in the Assyrian inscriptions, the kings in the
latter country having enough to do with lesser foes, a circumstance which,
no doubt, favoured the aggrandizement of the house of Luitipris. The
order of the Armenian kings is as follows : —

Sarduris L, son of Luitipris, contemporary with Shalmaneser II., 833 B.C.

Ispuinis, son of Sarduris, „ ,, Samsiramman III.

Menuas, son of Ispuinis, ,, ,, Rammannirari III.

Argistis, son of Menuas, ,, ,, Shalmaneser III.

Sarduris II., son of Argistis, ,, „ Assurdan III.

Ursa, ,, ,, Assurnirari II. [B.C.

Argistis II., „ „ Tiglath-Pileser III., 743

Erimenas, ,, „ Senacherib.

Russas, ,, ,, Assurbanipal.
Sarduris III., circ. 640 B.C.

Ispuinis left inscriptions in the cuneiform character, but the Vannic
language, of which three or four remain, and have been copied ; and those
of Menuas, who appears to have been associated with his father, are com-
paratively numerous. Both he and Argistis must have had fairly long as
well as prosperous reigns ; indeed, the latter claims to have defeated the
armies of Assyria, as well as to have conquered the country of the Hit-
tites. On the east, Media set a limit to the ambition of the Vannic kings,
but the country all round Lake Urmia, and around the Euphrates, from its
source to Carchemish, submitted to Argistis, and only the revival of Assyria
under Tiglath-Pileser III. put an end to the chance of Armenia becoming
the centre of an empire, able to rival or succeed that of Nineveh. Armenia
continued to be sufficiently independent and hostile to provide the natural
place of refuge for the murderers of Senacherib. This was probably in the
reign of Erimenas, whose son, Russas, sent an embassy to Arbela, desiring
peace and friendship with Assyria, an example followed by his successor,
Sarduris III.

The records of this pre- Aryan kingdom of Armenia are chiefly interesting
from the philological and ethnic point of view. The Van inscriptions
were long regarded as presenting as insoluble a problem as those of
Hamath, and the comparative success of the last attempt at their decipher-

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 303

ment l is owing to the circumstance that the Assyrian formulas of conquest
and imprecation are closely followed in them. Where this clue fails, it is
likely enough that the translation may have to be revised in future, but
several points are made clear. Nearly all proper names, whether of the
kings or gods, end in as, is, or us, like those of the Kassites ; and the
affinities of the language are with Georgian, the only modern survivor of
the archaic group of semi-Tatar tongues which evidently preceded the
Semitic and Aryan families in Asia as well as Europe.

The language is inflexional, but more archaic than the Hamitic tongues

in possessing no gender. The numerals begin as in Assyrian, < is 10, and
is 60, but 70, 80, and 90 are indicated by a unit plus one or more tens,

[•£ etc., as if the sexagesimal notation of Babylonia were followed ; and

an inscription of Argistis, in which he speaks of dedicating one sixtieth of
the spoil to the god Khaldis,2 also looks as if 60 rather than 10 was the
normal unit in the second " place." The fact is the more significant as

the Assyrians, from whom the characters were borrowed, use J for 50— the

half hundred, as their system is virtually decimal, and ]K for 60 instead
of 70.

The Urardhians used cave tombs, like all their congeners, and the word
for them is akin to that still used in Armenia for a tomb, and in Georgia
for the pits in which corn is stored, and to that used, according to Strabo,
in Thrace and Cappadocia for the latter objects of utility. The mother
of Menuas set up an inscription in his honour by an aqueduct, and called
the monument " the place of the son of Taririas," that being her own
name ; and as inscriptions are always limited to the most familiar phrases,
we may infer that such a method of describing the king's descent was not
unusual. The compound substantive translated " family," means literally
•" children-household," 3 and this again may betoken a conception of the
family like that of the Iberians and Egyptians, in which the household as
a unit is only fully established by the birth of children.

*' The four Khaldises of the house " are enumerated among the gods
receiving sacrifices by Ispuinis and Menuas, and so are the Khaldises of
the citadel and the gods of the city ; the phrase in the latter case bearing
a close resemblance to the old Sumerian formula: "To the gods, the
•children of Khaldis of the city, an ox, two sheep." Khaldis in the singular
is apparently the great god of the country, the father of its people, while
multitudinous tutelary spirits bear the same name. It is impossible not
to wonder whether we have a reminiscence of this ubiquitous deity in the
Karthlos of Georgian tradition,4 and it is certain that the explanation of

1 The cuneiform inscriptions of Van, deciphered and translated. By A. H. Sayce.
Journ. Royal Asiatic Soc., 1882, pp. 377-732, and vol. xx. pp. 1-48, and 1893, PP-I~39-

2 /£., p. 614. 3 2b., p. 437. 4 Post, Book III. ch. v.

304 . ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

the name of Khaldsei given by the Greeks to the Chalybes lies in the
use of the term Khaldias or Khaldikas, the people or race of Khaldis, to-
describe the men of Van.

The Aryan invasion of Armenia can hardly have begun before the sixth
century B.C., and it is doubtful whether the change of language which was
certainly effected, has not led to an exaggerated estimate of its ethnic re-
sults. The head of an Armenian ambassador to Assurbanipal belongs dis-
tinctly to the living type, which is shown by v. Luschau's photographs to
resemble the most archaic forms surviving in Asia Minor. Of course we
cannot hope to learn anything of the ancient laws of Van, any more than
of the laws of Elam and Susiana, but such remains of archaic custom
as can be found in modern Armenia can be interpreted the more confi-
dently by the light of earlier parallels now that the affinities of the original
inhabitants of the country are made clear.

§ 4. BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. FROM TIGLATH-PILESER III. TO

SARGON.

If we return now to the annals of Assyria, there is no further scarcity of
material. Tiglath-Pileser III.1 (745-727 B.C.) became king of Assyria three
years after the accession of Nabonassar, king of Babylon, with whom a new
chronological era begins, while another Babylonian chronicle also opens
witli his reign.

It has been supposed that Tiglath-Pileser was an usurper of partly
Babylonian extraction, mainly for three reasons : because there is no
record of collisions between him and Nabonassar, though he attacked
various Aramaean tribes, which had formerly been allies or dependants of
Babylon ; because his Annals were deliberately defaced by Esarhaddon,
who can have had no personal grudge against him ; and because his per-
sonal name, Pulu, was retained by him when he became king of Babylonia
in 728. He must have been previously known by this name to account
for its appearance in the Hebrew records, where Pul and Tiglath-Pileser 3
are treated as distinct persons.

At the beginning of his reign he claimed possession of Sippara, and
talks of receiving the submission of Kardunias, while the land of the
Chaldees paid him tribute and Merodach Baladan of Bit Jakin,3 who sub-
sequently became king of Babylon, was compelled to " kiss his feet"
Elsewhere he speaks of ruling Kardunias, the wide land, and of offering
bright sacrifices to the gods of Sippara, Nipur, Babylon, Borsippa, Kuta, Kis,
Dilbat, and Erech, the unrivalled cities, and boasts that his priesthood was
acceptable to these great gods. The Assyrian monarchy might not un-
fairly be described as including all the lands between the four seas, and,

1 For his inscriptions see Schrader, A"./?., ii. p. 3-33, and Hommel, G.B.A., p. 648 ff.

2 I Chron. v. 26.

3 The land of Jakin, like Bit Humri, after the founder of a thriving State on the
Persian Gulf.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 305

except Egypt, no civilized kingdom lay outside its influence; so- that the
terms used to describe the cities of Babylonia are full of significance and
justify what has been said conjecturally about the importance and inde-
pendence of the kingdom up to this time. The entry in the eponymous
chronicle for 729 and 728 is "the king takes the hands of Bel," a cere-
mony performed every year by the legitimate king of Babylon, and ap-
parently equivalent to consecration in that character.

The campaigns in Armenia have been already noticed, and the final
victory of Tiglath-Pileser in 734, when the Armenian king was shut up in
his capital, and the Assyrian army commanded all the country round,
probably delayed for a couple of centuries the transfer of the seat of em-
pire, ultimately accomplished under the Persians. Without this check it is
likely that the Armenian monarchy would have assimilated and absorbed
the elements of strength in Media and Persia, and have, in a way, fore-
stalled the empire of Parthia. One of the names which recurs in the
accounts of the king's western victories is Kustaspi of Kummuh, or Com-
magene, a district located on either side of the Euphrates, to the north of
Bit-adini, and it is remarkable, if, as seems almost inevitable, we identify
it with the Persian Gustasp,1 as an indication of the extension to the north
and west, beyond Armenia itself, of a population akin to that of the Median
highlands.

In Syria and Palestine the alternatives of an Egyptian or Assyrian
alliance had long been familiar, to princes who found themselves too weak
for their safety, or not strong enough for their ambition. Thus Ahaz,
king of Judah, sought the alliance of Assyria against Rezin, king of
Damascus, and Pekah, king of Samaria, and according to the annals of
Tiglath-Pileser, the death of Rezin and the capture of Damascus was
followed by the death of Pekah,2 and the carrying captive of the people
of Bit Omri. Hosea, who afterwards revolted against Shalmaneser, was
appointed by the Assyrians in lieu of Pekah.

The earlier passage in which the name of Azariah, king of Judah, occurs,
is unfortunately imperfect; but it is clear that during the first part of the
long reign of this king, the name and influence of Judah were " spread
abroad" (2 Chron. xxvi. 8, 15), so that his alliance was sought by a
Hittite federation, and Tiglath-Pileser had some trouble in reasserting his
authority over his former tributaries.3 Azariah is not mentioned, like
Menahem of Samaria, as paying tribute, and the submission of Ahaz
would, of course, be the more acceptable if Judah itself had never been
definitely defeated before. Both the Hebrew and the Assyrian records
begin at this time to record conflicts with Arabian kingdoms, and Dr.
Glaser supposes Tiglath-Pileser to have penetrated as far inland as the

1 Hommel, however, does not accept the identification.

2 The expression of the annals is " I slew him," but this is not necessarily inconsistent
with 2 Kings xv. 30, as Hosea would be represented as serving the king by slaying his
enemy.

3 The passage in question belongs to the year 738, and from this time onwards the
Assyrian records help to control the chronology of the kings of Israel and Judah.

P.C. X

3o6 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

Djauf district ; l the hills of Media and the deserts of Arabia mark the

utmost limits of his expeditions, and are described in the same words

" a place which is far off."

In 726 B.C. Tiglath-Pileser was succeeded by a king who reigned for five
years over Babylonia and Assyria, and bore in the latter country the name
of Salmanasar, though in the former, like his predecessor, he continued to
bear the personal name of Ululai. He is the Shalmaneser of Kings xvii.
3, who, when his tributary, Hosea, turned to Egypt for help to throw off
the yoke, besieged Samaria for three years, and then carried Israel captive
into Assyria. Egypt had just at this time been reunited under Sabako,
the first king of the (25th) Ethiopian Dynasty, after the death of the ill-
fated Bocchoris ; but while she was ready to serve as an asylum for
Syrian fugitives,2 she was not disposed to repeat the campaigns of
Thothmes and Rameses, and Hosea obtained no assistance thence. Sargon
(721-705 B.C.) claims, it is true, the victory over Samaria as occurring in the
first year of his reign, but the Jewish historians are hardly likely to have
made the mistake of substituting the obscurer prince for their real con-
queror, while it was easy for the Assyrian annalists to confound the year
in which a campaign was decided, with that when the captives made in it
reached their new destination. Besides, the national annals would have
been left imperfect if victories, begun by a king who did not live to record
them, were allowed to pass unchronicled; and, as it happens, no inscrip-
tions have been found by this Salmanasar, except his name on a weight of
two royal mina.

Sargon, who succeeded Shalmaneser as king of Assyria, may have been
a Babylonian by birth, and certainly was much more than any of his
Assyrian predecessors under the influence of primitive Babylonian ideas.
His selection of the name, borne by the great traditional king of Akkad,
is an indication of his sympathies. He and his descendants nowhere
claim kinship with Salmanasar, though, as he succeeded without opposition,
he may have been designated by the latter to succeed, either as a favourite
officer or a son-in-law. In the Babylonian list of kings, Senacherib is
described as belonging to a new dynasty, of Habigal, just as Ululai (Sal-
manasar) rather than his father Pul, is said to found the dynasty of Tinu.
Esarhaddon, however, with whose father the dynasty resumes its Assyrian
character, calls himself " son of Senacherib, son of Sargon," and " ever-
lasting posterity of Bel-ibni, son of Adasu, king of Assur, offshoot of
the city of Assur ;" as if he wished to strengthen the claim derived from
his immediate predecessors by a pedigree going back to the dim begin-
nings of the State.

On the death of Salmanasar in 721 B.C., the throne of Babylon was seized

1 Skizze der Geschichte und Geographic Arabiens von den altesten Zeiten bis zum
Propheten Muhammad, vol. ii. p. 260.

2 Hanno, a prince of Gaza, took refuge in Egypt in the later years of Tiglath-Pileser,
and after the fall of Samaria, Sabako himself encountered the Assyrians at Raphia, and
had to flee to his own country.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 307

by Merodach Baladan, the king of the maritime country of Bit Jakin, and
held for twelve years. He allied himself with Ummanigas, the king of
Elam, who, according to the Babylonian chronicle, had defeated Sargon
in a battle before Dnr-ilu, in 720, and devastated Assyria with much
slaughter. With the curious indulgence previously noticed in the dealings
of Assyria with Babylonia, ten years were allowed to pass before Sargon
turned his arms against these allies. In 709 he defeated Merodach Baladan,
who fled to Elam, and in the same year, according to the chronicle, seated
himself on the throne of Babylon ; in the next year he grasped the hands
of Bel, and captured Dur Jakin, the stronghold of the maritime provinces
whence Kardunias had more than once had to accept a ruler. Hommel's
view is that the rapprochement between the kingdoms of Nineveh and
Babylon, indicated by their obedience to the same king, was partly volun-
tary on the part of the latter ; when Babylon had to choose between
incursions from the Chaldsean kingdoms of the south — where the remains
of the Kosssean people had concentrated themselves — together with the
Elamite and nomad allies of the latter, and annexation by the not more
alien Assyrians, she may have preferred the latter alternative, or at least
not have resented its being forced on her.1

The Chaldaeans, "whose cry is in their ships,"2 are evidently the same
people as the followers of Merodach Baladan, who " trusted in the salt
water ; " 3 and as the Hebrew prophets always speak of the new Babylonian
monarchy as Chaldaean, the reaction against Assyria must have been felt
at the time to proceed from the south. Kardunias became pacific when
it had absorbed the dominant Kassite minority which founded the Third
Babylonian Dynasty, and if the Kaldu of Sumer were not themselves
Kassites, they seem to have supplied the militant energy in Southern
Babylonia, which lay dormant for centuries in the northern district of
Kardunias or Akkad.

It has been ingeniously suggested that Sargon may have borne the
Babylonian personal name, Irba or Iriba, and thus have been the king Jareb
of the prophet Hosea.4 He was not altogether free from the Assyrian foible
of massacring his foes and flaying their leaders, but his domestic administra-
tion aimed sincerely at promoting the welfare of his subjects, and restor-
ing those who had suffered from war and conquest to their customary
liberties and privileges. In one of his inscriptions he calls himself " the
diligent king whose speech announces blessings," and tells how "he
directed his mind towards the settlement of suitable ruined places, the
opening out of the ground, and the planting of reeds. He devised means
to render the high rocks productive in which no blade had ever sprung.

1 Winckler holds that the policy of the Assyrian kings was to absorb or inherit from
Babylon, rather than to conquer it, and he supposes Sargon to have contented himself
with the title of Viceroy or Stadtholder of Babylon, in order not to become liable to
religious duties of worship, involving too prolonged residence in the city.

2 Isaiah xliii. 14.

8 Schrader, X.B., ii. p. 69.

4 Hosea v. 13 ; x. 6. Sayce, Bab. and Or. Rec., ii. p. 18 ff.

308 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

In desolate places where no irrigation canals had been seen under any
former king, his heart moved him to set up sheaves and let rejoicings be
heard, and he fixed the bed of the water course, and opened the dams so
that the water of abundance might pour in everywhere like a flood." 1

This king "of clear understanding with strong eyes for all things, who
grew up in counsel and knowledge, and waxed old in wisdom," provided
the whole land of Assur with nourishment. Worthy of his kingdom were
the storehouses " filled with the firstfruits, which save in the stress of hunger,
and do not let corn, wine and incense (?) the delight of men's hearts, come
to an end. In order that oil, the blessing of mankind, that heals ulcers,
may not become dear in my land, and that the price of sesamum like that
of corn may be fixed, that meals corresponding to the dishes of the gods
and the king may be well ordered, tariffs (?) with the prices fixed for every-
thing were set up in its borders."2

When himself about to erect palaces and temples in the cities he
restored, he declares : " In accordance with the meaning of my name,3 to
give protection with right and justice, to guide the powerless, and not to
destroy the weak, as the great gods have called me, I gave money for the
plots of land in the town, silver and copper to their owners, according to
the tablet of prices, and that I might not do evil, to those who would
not take money for the land, I gave a piece of land opposite to the land,
the place of their countenance," i.e. of their original possession. In his
character as king of the Four Regions, the beloved of the great gods,
he " ordered the worship of Sippara, Nipur and Babylon, succoured their
poor, composed their quarrels (?)... extended his shadow (shelter) over
Haran, and wrote out the statement of their rights as men of Anu and
Bel." 4 If this is the correct rendering, the allusion must be to the sanc-
tion of the gods invoked in all legal title deeds, and elsewhere he speaks
of renewing the "lawful regulation of ownership in Haran and Assur,
'which had long been forgotten when the sovereignty over them was lost." 5

No doubt before the rise of Assyria, Haran had been in every sense
of the word a free trading city, and the imposition of taxes or tribute
upon such a cosmopolitan emporium would only be proposed by one of
the less intelligent of the Assyrian conquerors, whose nominal sway was
sustained by nothing more permanent than the presence of his armies.
Sargon proposed to restore the good old times of municipal self-govern-
ment, and it is possible that if his reign had not been cut short, he might
have established a durable and civilized empire, extending from Armenia
to Arabia, and from the land of Elam to the Mediterranean. Towards Baby-
lonia proper he assumed the attitude of a liberator from the tyranny of Bit

1 Hommel, £.£./?., p. 685.

2 F. E. Peiser, K.B.,\\. p. 45.

3 Sarru-ukin means "the king has ordained," but the Assyrians seem to have read it
Sarru-kinu, " the true " or perhaps rather " the right king," which again might be under-
stood, the legitimate or, as here, the righteous king. Jb. p. 47.

4 Hommel apparently renders the same passage "as warriors of Anu and Dagan
(the king) imposed laws on them."

5 K.B., ii. pp. 41, 53.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 309

Jakin ; and after the destruction of Merodach Baladan's citadel, accord-
ing to the Annals, he released the sons of the Babylonian cities Sippara,
Nipur, Babel, and Borsippa, who were held captive there. "I opened
their prison and let them again behold the light ; their fields, which long
ago, during the occupation of the country, the Suti had taken away
and appropriated to themselves, I gave back to them ; the Suti, nomad
tribes, I smote, and restored to their (former) condition the lands taken
away by them. Ur, Erech, Eridu, Larsa, Kisik, Nimit-laguda, I again
made independent ; their ravished gods I led back to their towns and
renewed the offerings which had fallen into oblivion." l

Some of the traits disclosed in the above passages — such as respect for
the rights of cities and regard for the ownership of land, the regulating of
prices and the concern on the part of the State that they should be kept
uniform and moderate — may have been characteristic of the economy of
ancient Babylonia, rather than of the reforming zeal of Sargon, but it is
peculiar and personal to him alone of the kings of Assyria to dwell at
length, with pride and pleasure, upon these instances of good government,
as of equal importance with his conquests and erections. This virtuous
ruler was assassinated in 705, but as Senacherib his son, who reigned in
his stead, reverted to the less amiable Assyrian type, one is justified in
suspecting him to have fallen a victim to palace treachery rather than
popular ingratitude; the rather that the relationship acknowledged by
Esarhaddon is studiously ignored in Senacherib's inscriptions, while his
name, " O Sin, multiply the brothers," suggests that he was a younger son
arid probably not lawfully designated for the succession.

§ 5. FROM SENACHERIB TO THE FALL OF NINEVEH.

Senacherib's reign in Assyria lasted from 704 to 68 1 B.C., but the Babylonian
chronicle only recognises him as reigning for two years, from 704, and for
eight years, from 688, while the Ptolemaic canon records an interregnum
during all the years claimed for him. He is supposed to have appointed
one of his brothers as vice-king in Babylon on his accession, but under one
leader or another, the Assyrian yoke was resisted till 688, when after a pro-
longed and undecided conflict with Elam, Senacherib concentrated his
forces upon Babylon, took the city, and after a carnival of plunder and
slaughter, laid it level with the ground. Just that portion of the empire
which his great father delighted to honour and conciliate, was the in-
veterate enemy of the son and the object of his remorseless vengeance.
Something more than personal idiosyncrasy seems needed to explain this
contrast : Sargon's mild liberalism showed itself in his sympathy for the kin-
dred nation with an earlier tradition of respect for the popular will, and
Senacherib's military ambition, associated however with military skill far
inferior to his father's, led him to prefer the memory of the earlier,
narrower and fiercer kings of Assyria, in whom religious and political
1 Hommel, G.B-.A., p. 685.

310 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

intolerance were blended so that one or other could never fail to furnish
an excuse for war.

During nearly a century (721-626) the house of Sargon retained some
part of the conquests secured by its founder. Once more, as nearly 1,000
years before, the kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia came into collision,
and as before, Syria and Palestine were the field where the struggle for
supremacy had to be fought out. Egypt was now strong enough to be for-
midable, and especially strong enough to seem a desirable ally to all who
sought to throw off the Assyrian yoke. But Egypt had no turn for politi-
cal administration, and did even less than Assyria towards annexing the
districts which paid her tribute, while she cared nothing for allies or depen-
dants who only promised political or military support. Her intervention
in the affairs of Syria thus only had the effect of showing her great rival
that there were no impassable barriers between Memphis and Megiddo ;
while the fruitless Egyptian expeditions of Esarhaddon and Nebuchadnezzar
only smoothed the way for the future conquests of Persia.

The story of the campaigns of Sargon and his successors forms an inter-
esting chapter in the history of the Old World, because it shows the new
national forces which were coming into being. If the age of Thothmes
and Karaindas may be called the Cinque cento, the Elizabethan age of
the Old World, the seventh century B.C. stands towards the Middle Anti-
quity of the classical era somewhat as the same century A.D. does towards
the history of modern Europe. A new civilization in each case was begin-
ning to arise, of new materials, cast in a form determined partly by antago-
nism and partly by imitation. When Greece and Rome divided with Car-
thage the mastery of the West, Nineveh and Babylon were a memory and
a power, such as Rome and Byzantium became, when the kingdoms of
Northern Europe were growing into strength.

In this seventh century, the Assyrians, in vindicating their title of rulers
of the world, were obliged to extend their pretensions beyond the familiar
territory of the Hittites into Cilicia and the land of Tubal. The way was
opened for constant pacific intercourse with lesser Asia, when the Assyrian
kings gave their daughters in marriage to their most distant tributaries ;
and the raids of the Cimmerians from the far north-west could not be
repulsed, without revealing unexpected distances in the Four Regions,
which their titular monarch could not hesitate to explore. One of the
least sober passages in the Assyrian annals is that in which Assurbanipal
describes his relations with Guggu, king of Luddu ( — Gyges, king of
Lydia), " a region beyond the sea, a distant place, the very name of which
the kings my fathers had not heard," a place indeed so remote that
Assyria, where all the languages in the world were known, could not
produce an interpreter who understood its speech.1

According to the Assyrian annals, Gyges, when threatened by an in-
vasion of the Cimmerians, was warned in a dream by the god Assur :
" Embrace the feet of Sardanapalus, and in his name conquer thy foes."
1 Hommel, G.B.A., p. 725 n.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 311

While he obeyed this oracle he was victorious even over assailants who
themselves defied the king of Assyria and his ancestors ; but afterwards,
when he trusted in his own strength and sent troops to the aid of Psamme-
tichus, king of Egypt, his justly offended protector invoked the vengeance
of Assur and Istar, praying them : " May his corpse be cast before his face,
and may they carry away his bones ! " And it was so, for the Cimmerians
came and subdued his whole land. But his son Ardys sent messengers to
acknowledge the king of Assyria as king and god, saying, — " Thou didst
curse my father and evil befel him, but to me thy reverent servant be
gracious and lay not thy yoke upon me."1

The last great king of Assyria is the most imaginative, and it is unusually
difficult to ascertain from this record what really passed between him and
the king of Lydia. But the father of western history was surely well in-
spired by his imagination, when he opened his record of " the great and
wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians," with a story of the
Lydian kings, following the mention of Phoenician traders,, whose vessels
were freighted with the wares of Egypt and Assyria ; for it was in Lydia,.
and through Phoenicia, that both empires came in contact with Greece.
In the seventh century the sphere of Assyrian influence reached as far as
the river Halys, while the Lydian kings gradually claimed authority over
all the nations to the west of that boundary.

In 678 B.C. Assyria had been seriously alarmed by the threat of a
Cimmerian invasion, and the defeat inflicted on the northern hordes in
Hubuschia only just sufficed to save the north-eastern frontier of the
kingdom from their inroads. This was in the reign of Esarhaddon, and it
is probable that the effective resistance offered by Assyria helped to turn
the course of the Cimmerians decisively to the west.2

The Assyrians use the word Kutu as a general term for the mountain
people on their east, and the Cimmerians and the people of Manna are on
occasion included under it with the Medes. And it is perhaps owing to
this confusion that Tiuspa, whom it is scarcely rash to identify with
Teispes, the Achaemenian, is described as leading the Cimmerians and
being himself a Manna warrior. In Persia and Cappadocia we know,
what is only matter of conjecture or inference in the Mediterranean settle-
ments further west, that the first bands of the new Aryan or Indo-German
race were, to all appearance, merged in the former population, and that no
immediate change of nationality was obvious, except in the name of the
ruling house. To the Jews a later king of Persia was still Darius the Mede,
and the readiness with which Babylon accepted, not to say welcomed, the
substitution of Cyrus for Nabonidus is probably to be explained by the

1 Ib., p. 726. Jensen (K.B., ii. p. 173) concludes, "and let me" or "may I bear thy
yoke."

2 Hommel argues (G.B.A., p. 723) that the first historical appearance of the Cimmer-
ians is in the plain of the Araxes, and that as they appeared on the north-west of Assyria
eighteen years earlier than in Lydia, it is at least as likely that they came straight to the
former point from S. Russia over the Caucasus and thence to Asia Minor, as that they
followed the Danube towards Thrace and turned back to Asia Minor.

312 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

impression that he was no more an alien, than the Kassite or Elamite
kings, under whom Sumer and Akkad had often before enjoyed peace and
security.

Sargon's reign, as already mentioned, began with the fall of Samaria. In
717 Carchemish was reduced to the condition of an Assyrian province,
after a struggle for independence in alliance with the Moschi. In 715 he
overthrew the Arabs of the desert, and received presents from Pharaoh,
king of Egypt, S imsi, queen of Arabia, and the kings of the sea coast and
the desert About 710 he is supposed to have reached Cyprus, whence he
received gifts from seven kings and where a stele, now in the Berlin
Museum, was set up in his honour. His campaigns against Armenia and
its allies in the east and west practically secured Cilicia for the empire,
and from the land of the Moschi to that of Man and Media, the threaten-
ing element was held back if not subjugated. The name of his adver-
saries, however, shows the s'eady advance of Aryan tribes.

Senacherib's conquests in Syria were neutralized by the failure of his
attack on Tyre and the disasters which befel the army sent against Heze-
kiah, king of Judah. The importance of this prince is not exaggerated in
the Jewish chronicles. Carchemish, Hamath, Damascus, and Samaria had
succumbed in turn, and the king of Southern Babylonia, who still defied the
power of Assyria, could find no nearer ally than Hezekiah on the west.
Assyria had no allies, only reluctant tributaries, and hence the confederacy,
into which Merodach Baladan sought to bring Elam, Judah, and Egypt, was
powerful enough to inflict a serious check. The nature of the calamity
which befel the army of Senacherib, which Egyptian and Jewish tradition
agreed in regarding as miraculous, is not known, but it was sufficiently
serious to put an end to his aggressions in that quarter, so that Hezekiah
ended his days in peace, and Tirhaka was able to add the crown of Egypt
to that of Ethiopia, and was unmolested from without for nearly thirty
years after the retreat of Senacherib. The latter's campaigns in Southern
Chaldsea had equally equivocal results, and his eldest son, whom he
appointed king of Babylonia in 699, is only recognised as reigning six
months, the effective and disastrous conquest being delayed till 688 B.C.

Like his father, Senacherib had to contend at the same time against the
Chaldseans and the Elamites, with whom were associated all the inhabi-
tants, old and new, Medes and Persians, of the eastern mountains. In
Cilicia, where he is said to have founded the city of Tarsus anew, it is pos-
sible that he came for the first time in direct contact with the Greeks ; but
the intervening barbarians, whose kinsmen were shortly to sweep away
every trace of the Assyrian empire, prevented any serious rivalry between
these representatives of the old and the new order.

The thirty years' truce between east and west was broken by the refusal
of tribute on the part of Tyre, the city relying upon the " broken reed " of
Egyptian succour, with the result that Esarhaddon (681-668) added to the
titles of his predecessors that of king of Egypt, and in his third Egyptian
campaign (670), after three sanguinary battles, became master of Memphis,

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 313

extending his conquests at least as far as Thebes. Tirhaka subsequently
recovered Memphis from Necho, the Assyrian nominee, and two other
expeditions in the reign of Assurbanipal were needed to complete the expul-
sion of the Ethiopian dynasty and the establishment of Necho's son Psam-
metichus. Practically all that Assyria gained by these victories was to
deprive malcontent Syrian princes of the hope of help from Egypt, and to
cause such petty princes of the Delta, as had been partly independent of
Pharaoh, to acknowledge the king of Assyria as their suzerain instead.
Sardanapalus enumerates twenty Egyptian "kings" besides Necho as
making submission to him, and the number helps to explain the extraor-
dinary multiplication of potentates bearing this name in all the Assyrian
inscriptions ; for many of the so-called kings are evidently only nomarchs
or semi-independent governors of towns.

Esarhaddon restored Babylon and repelled the attack of the Cimmerians
and mountain folk under Teispes. He restored to some people of North-
ern Arabia, images of the gods carried off by Senacherib and a princess
who had shared the same fate, with intent that the latter should be
accepted as queen.1 In fact, the Assyrian kings were in the habit of
utilizing their rare moods of mercy, and keeping the young representatives
of royal races, whom they had spared, in readiness that they might be able
to set up, as a subject kinglet, a captive who had been " reared like a little
dog" in the imperial palace.

Esarhaddon was succeeded in 668 B.C. by Assurbanipal (Assur begets an
heir son) in Assyria, while Babylon, presumably by his direction, fell to the
share of a younger son, Samas-sum-ukin. The Babylonian chronicle shows
that this appointment was intended as a restoration of the independence
forfeited under Senacherib, for it states that in the beginning of the new
king's reign "Bel and the gods of Akkad left Assyria and entered Babylon."2
The political interests of the brothers were not identical, and while Assur-
banipal warred against Elam — as the slabs from his palace, now at the
British Museum, show — the king of Babylon sought alliances east and
west, among the men of the hills, the seas and the desert, and hastened
the influences already at work for the destruction of an empire, which
yet showed no external signs of impending decay.

The inscriptions of Assurbanipal are among the most copious and the
most confidential of those bequeathed by Assyrian kings. He was an
enthusiastic warrior, hunter, and student ; a lover of women, enumerating
with pride all the kings' daughters he condescended to espouse, and a
devoted worshipper of the gods. Early in his reign he marched twice
into Egypt, defeating a sister's son of Sabako, who had followed Tirhaka
on the throne. He established Psammetichus as king of Memphis, but the
troubles in Babylonia and Elam prevented him from reasserting his authority
when the Egyptian ruler claimed independence, by the help of Ionian and
Carian mercenaries, perhaps first sent to him as auxiliaries by Gyges, in
that alliance which provoked prophetic curses from the Assyrian monarch.
1 K.B., ii. p. 131. 2 Ib., p. 285.

3i4 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

It was not till the latter half of his long reign that Assurbanipal had
disembarrassed himself of his brother and the Elamite allies of Babylon.
About 640, five years after the pacification and reunion of Egypt, he was
able to turn his attention to Arabia, where the Nabatseans in particular
had joined the confederacy against Assyria. This people seems to have
been widely spread, for Senacherib speaks of defeating them in Chaldaga,
while his grandson found them established substantially upon the site of
the monarchy which flourished seven hundred years later. The complete-
ness of the Assyrian victory is measured in quaintly commercial terms ;
camels fell into their hands in such numbers that they were scattered like
sheep among the people of Assur ; throughout Assyria, camels cost only
half a silver shekel in the market, and peasants could obtain slaves and
camels for a handful of corn.1

Judging from contemporary records, there was nothing in the reign of
Assurbanipal to intimate that his empire was doomed. It might be said
that under Sargon the Assyrian empire was aggressive, and that now it
stood rather upon the defensive, even in its attacks upon Elam and Arabia.
But even after the event it is impossible to take any other view of the
reign than as a brilliant and prosperous one. The sculptured annals of
the king were never more animated and picturesque, so that even the
antiquarian revival, to which we owe the invaluable bi-linguals of the royal
library, was not prompted by the decay of original composition.

The history of the twenty years from the death of Assurbanipal (625 B.C.)
to the fall of Nineveh (606) is obscure, and the interval allows time for the
action of many disintegrating forces. According to Herodotus, the Medes
attacked Assyria, the Cimmerians the Medes, and the Scyths the Cim-
merians , and he attributes to the Scyths twenty-eight years of dominion in
Asia, during which time their devastations extended from Assyria to the
borders of Egypt. These are the people of Jer. v. 15-18, by whom Judah
feared and just escaped destruction. The relation between the Scythian
and Cimmerian incursions cannot, of course, be traced with any clearness ;
but there can be no doubt that the destruction of Nineveh, like the sack
of Rome, was the result of such a double or treble movement of popula-
tion as Herodotus describes ; and that the Assyrian armies were destroyed
by barbarians before the capital itself fell into the hands of the Medes.

The fall of the monarchy was hastened by the defection of Nabopolassar,
a general of the last Assyrian king, Sarakus, who made himself king of
Babylon, when sent to secure it for his master. The empire of Assyria
was an artificial one, and the effect of the Median conquest was to resolve
it into its elements. Media, Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor were simply
set free from its claim to authority ; Syria and Palestine fell under the
influence of Egypt till Nebuchadnezzar, for a brief space, reclaimed them
for Babylon, while the border lands of Mesopotamia were laid waste by
the barbarians. Assyria itself was not merely a small country, but as
compared with Babylonia it was destitute of natural advantages. Larger

1 K.B., ii. p. 225.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 315

dykes were needed to restrain the Tigris than the Euphrates, and even
less of the soil was fruitful without irrigation. The chief cities were not
on any great natural lines of traffic, and the incessant campaigns of the
kings prevented any growth of population which might have enabled the
adjoining countries to be annexed by the gradual expansion of the domi-
nant nation. The transportation of whole conquered peoples, by which
the Assyrians hoped to secure their conquests, had, in fact, the very
opposite effect ; it gave a population of discontented aliens to the
provinces nearest the seat of empire, while the smaller bands of natives
exported to the conquered countries, were absorbed there and did nothing
to promote their loyalty. The very fact that it was possible to settle large
bands of captives on Assyrian lands shows that they must have been
imperfectly settled or cultivated, while the defeat of the Assyrian army set
all who could escape the invaders free to return to their own countries.

All this contributed to facilitate the destruction of Nineveh, and to make
the ruin of Assyria as complete as it was sudden. But the very suddenness
of the destruction has helped to preserve the relics and records of her
former greatness. The libraries of Babylon lived to be dispersed, and
countless tablets, inscribed with all the wisdom of the Chaldseans, have
disappeared gradually, like so much waste paper, in the course of centuries,
while Mesopotamia was still populous and thriving, though all memory of
the ancient language and learning of the people had been lost. The
libraries of Senacherib and Sardanapalus, on the other hand, slumbered
securely in the mounds of Koyoundjik, protected, by the desolation and
oblivion which had befallen the great city, against all the armies of Persia,
Greece, and Rome, as they swept past in chase of such world-wide
empire as had first been dreamt of there.

§ 6. THE NEW BABYLONIAN EMPIRE.

At the beginning of the sixth century, Nineveh was no more, but Egypt
and Babylon seemed, on the surface, to be entering upon a new era of
prosperity. Only the Hebrew prophets, with perceptions sharpened by
patriotic griefs and fears, seem to have divined that both were themselves
tottering to their fall ; that the independence of Babylon the Great would
not long survive that of Jerusalem, and that destruction was coming upon
Egypt from the peoples of the north. Psammetichus had profited by the
feebleness of Assyria to besiege Ashdod, and his grandson reached Abu-
Simbel in the attempt to. recover Nubia; but in all their military enterprises,
Greek, Carian, and Phoenician mercenaries — whose signatures can still be
seen on the colossi of Rameses II. — formed the chief strength, and with
the introduction -in mass of northern warriors, Egypt forfeited for ever the
security of seclusion.

" The Ethiopians and Libyans that handle the shield " doubtless con-
tinued to form an important element in the force, as in centuries gone by ;
but though not themselves enough of aliens to endanger the nationality of

316 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

their employers, they were too much so to assimilate the new auxiliaries.
Egypt was open now to foreign trade and foreign traffic ; l the fame of
Hundred-gated Thebes had reached the Homeridae ; three dynasties of
kings not of native origin had obtained the crown ; and, though the Shishaks
and Sargons of Bubastis were naturalized Egyptians, and the kings of
Napata as much Egyptianized as the Kassite kings of Babylonia were
Akkadianized, their reigns prepared the way for the fatal cosmopolitanism
of the Saite Dynasty. The Egyptian priesthood, which should have been
the guardian of Egyptian nationality, had by this time lost its disinterested-
ness, and, like the Hebrew prophets, its members cared more about the
piety than the patriotism of their rulers.

The kings of Judah were tempted by the hopes of an Egyptian alliance,
because with Egypt behind and the various kingdoms of Syria and Northern
Mesopotamia between them and Assyria, they hoped to be able to main-
tain their independence. The prophets of the opposition, represented by
Jeremiah, thought it better for the people to pay tribute to a distant king
of Assyria than to form alliances with Syria, Edom, and Egypt, which
would give the gods of those countries a chance of winning Jewish
worshippers. A policy of non-intervention with the protection of Jehovah
and, at the worst, the occasional sacrifice of the Temple treasures, might
always, as in the days of Ahaz, turn the tide of conquest somewhere else.
Trusting in Egypt and in the chariots and horsemen— which Egypt never,
in fact, sent to the rescue of any ally in need — was trusting in the arm of
flesh, while it was always possible that a remote little kingdom, which gave
no provocation, might be overlooked, and so the curious view confirmed,
according to which the Assyrians were the instruments used by Jehovah
for the chastisement of unbelievers, and rebellion against them a kind of
impiety.

It must have been as the outcome of these prepossessions that the
devout Josiah overshot the mark on the other side. As in the days of
Sargon and Merodach Baladan a coalition was formed against Assyria,
which this time was to prove successful, and while Nabopolassar, king of
Babylon, and Cyaxares, king of Media, were attacking Nineveh, Necho
invaded Palestine, to get his share of the spoils and to neutralize any
Assyrian troops that might be in the west. At this moment Josiah
thought it his mission to attack the Egyptians. He may have supposed
that so useless a friend could not be a dangerous enemy ; he may have
believed once too often in the divine tolerance of Assyrian armies ; or he
may have thought that Judah, rather than Egypt, had a right to the re-
version of the Assyrian supremacy, if other nations had really been called
to effect its destruction. Any way the adventure turned out ill, and Josiah
was slain at Megiddo, three years before the fall of Nineveh. Jehoahaz,
his son, was carried into Egypt, and for a moment it seemed as if the

1 The development of these may be measured by the discoveries of Mr. Flinders
Petrie at the Graeco-Egyptian town of Naukratis. Naukratis, Egypt Exploration Fund
Publications, 1888.

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 317

who^e country west of the Euphrates was to become subject to Egypt as
in the days of Thothmes.

But this was not to be. Nabopolassar died the year after the destruc-
tion of Nineveh and was succeeded by his son Nebuchadnezzar, under
whom the new Babylonian empire attained a splendour in which the
military glories of Assyria were blended with the peaceful triumphs con-
genial to the ancient land of Sumer and Akkad. In 604 Nebuchadnezzar
encountered Necho at Carchemish, and inflicted a crushing defeat ; "and
the king of Egypt came not any more out of his land, for the king of
Babylon had taken from the river of Egypt unto the river Euphrates all
that pertained to the king of Egypt." l

Jehoiakim, the Egyptian nominee, submitted without a struggle to
Nebuchadnezzar, who reached Jerusalem probably about 60 1 ; but just
before the end of his reign, 597, at the instigation of Egypt, he rebelled,
and his son Jehoiachin was left to encounter the wrath of the king of
Babylon. Ten years elapsed between the captivity of Jehoiachin, and the
destruction of Jerusalem, and the captivity of Zedekiah in 587, which only
calls for notice here, because, for the last time, vain promises of help from
Egypt had been held forth by the refugees, who had found an asylum
under Uahbra (the Pharaoh Hophra of Jeremiah).2 The latter, after
attacking Sidon, contented himself with oaval expeditions entailing no
serious risk, and it was Nebuchadnezzar who, after a long siege, received
the submission of the Phoenician capital.

The domestic revolution which placed Amasis on the throne of Egypt
(569 B.C.) did not prevent Nebuchadnezzar from carrying out the expedition
provoked by his predecessor in 568 ; but he did not attempt the conquest
of the country, so that, on the withdrawal of his troops, Amasis was free
to fraternize with Greece and Lydia, and prepare for a favourable record
with the rising literary race by gifts to the temple of Delphi. Since Egypt
had become a maritime power, the alliance with Lydia, begun, to the dis-
gust of Sardanapalus, in the days of Gyges and Psammetichus, grew closer
and more effective ; but Lydia and Cilicia had entered into alliance with
Nebuchadnezzar ; and by their good offices Lydia was reconciled with the
Medes, after the battle of the Halys, fixed chronologically by the eclipse
of the sun which accompanied it in 585 B.C. And while Babylonia re-
mained at peace with Media, there was nothing to threaten the tranquillity
of the Eastern world.

Nebuchadnezzar's inscriptions deal, after the fashion of Babylonia,
almost exclusively with his architectural achievements, but he was certainly
also a successful warrior, if less aggressive than his Assyrian predecessors.
Jeremiah witnesses to his victories over the Arabs, and a town which he
built at the mouth of the Euphrates, to protect traders against their incur-
sions, itself became an important commercial centre. Hommel 3 believes
that it was in his reign that Babel itself and the Euphrates obtained the
commercial importance associated with their names, and that it was not
1 2 Kings xxiv. 7. 2 Jer. xliv. 30. 3 G.B.A., p. 761.

3i8 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

till then that the trade of the world, from Armenia to East Arabia, took
this course. The commercial activity to which the contract tablets bear
witness from the age of Hammurabi is, however, scarcely reconcilable with
a merely domestic trade, and it is possible that the political revival under
Nebuchadnezzar only gave prominence to the state of things previously
existing inconspicuously.

Nabonidus, the royal archaeologist, succeeded to the throne of Babylon
in 555 B.C., seven years after the death of Nebuchadnezzar, from whom he
is separated by three insignificant reigns. A few years before, Elam, the
old enemy and old ally of Chaldsea, had lost its independence and been
annexed by the prince of Anzan, another ancient mountain State, men-
tioned in the inscriptions of Gudea. This principality is supposed to have
formed the nucleus of the future kingdom of Persia, though the reigning
house belonged to the Iranian branch of the new Aryan stock, instead of,
like their predecessors, to the same race as the Elamites and Armenians.
In 550 Media shared the fate of Elam, and the warriors of Astyages them-
selves surrendered Ecbatana into the hands of Cyrus. The Medes, like
the Egyptians, afterwards soothed their pride with the fiction that Cyrus
was the son of Astyages' daughter, and so perhaps by native custom, law-
ful heir, and Persia was allowed to inherit all the tributaries of Media, as
well as the old feud with Lydia.

There is no need to tell here the well-known story of Croesus and the
fall of Sardis, but, from one point of view, its place is rather at the end of
the history of the old world of Asia, than at the beginning of the new
civilization of Europe. The conquests of Media, like those of Assyria
and Egypt, had seldom been effected in a single campaign ; and Croesus
might well believe, even after a first defeat, that he would have time before
a new campaign to summon his allies from Babylonia, Egypt, and Greece.
But he had reckoned without the new factor which makes history write
itself with thriftless haste and a correspondingly ephemeral result. The
Aryan is in a hurry ; he fights as he builds, for the moment, not for pos-
terity ; and so Cyrus had carried the citadel of Sardis by surprise before
the confederacy, which had formerly saved Hezekiah from Senacherib,
could even be appealed to.

Sardis fell 546 B.C., and momentous as the event then seemed, it was of
less importance by itself than by its indirect result in revealing the existence
of Greece to Persia. For the moment, however, Cyrus contented himself
with the conquest of Asia Minor, and then naturally turned his thoughts to
the one kingdom near at hand which had a capital transcending by far
any city of his own. Media and Elam, the old allies of Babylon, had
been vanquished by Cyrus as well as Lydia, and a casus belli was supplied
by the mere fact of such alliance. Nabonidus, indeed, was innocent of
offence ; he was digging for the foundation stone of Naram-sin when a
more practical politician would have sought to rally Cush and Misraim,
Phut and Canaan, and all the mixed peoples of the east and north, against
the common foe. And with all his antiquarian zeal for the worship of the

BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 319

gods, in some inscrutable way he alienated the literati of his own capital,
so that the fall of Babylon was not even glorified by patriotic heroism.

A fragmentary chronicle, which shows how Babylonian scribes wrote the
history of kings they disapproved of, records how, for instance, in his
seventh year, " The king was in the town Tima, the king's son, the nobles,
and his warriors were in the land of Akkad ; he did not go to I-ki (Babel);
the god Nebo not to Tintir (Babel) ; Bel did not come forth ; the festivals
were not celebrated ; offerings were made in I-sagilla and I-zidda to the
gods of Babylon and Borsippa." l The drift of this and similar passages
is evidently to complain that the king neglects the proper religious obser-
vances, omits to " take the hands of Bel," and has the images of the gods
taken in procession, or not taken in procession, at the wrong times, or to
the wrong places. The significance of the offences cannot now be divined,
but it is possible that his historical enthusiasm may have led him to wish
to restore the ancient cities of Sumer to their former glory and let Babylon
count as third, after Nipur and Sippara, in the land of Akkad.

He seems to have offended Babylon without securing any special loyalty
elsewhere. Nebuchadnezzar attempted to concentrate the worship of all
the other gods at Babylon, without prejudice to the supremacy of Bel, and
his innovations do not seem to have offended the priests of Babylon ;
those of Nabonidus must have had or been accused of an opposite ten-
dency.

Whatever the secret history of his unpopularity may have been, the fact
is clear. In 539 there was a battle between Cyrus and the soldiers of
Akkad ; but the people revolted,, and Sippara was taken without a blow ;
three days later the warriors of Cyrus advanced on Babylon, and Naboni-
dus, who fortified himself there,, was taken. The chronicle here evidently
represents the official view dictated by the Persians, and we are assured
that, though the siege lasted three months, no weapon was raised against
I-sagilla or the other temples, and none of their ornaments were damaged
or carried off, and that when (Oct. 19, 539 B.C.) Cyrus entered Babylon in
peace, the streets were filled to see him pass.

1 Schrader, K.B.> vol. iii. pt. ii. p. 131. The same complaints are reiterated in the
ninth year.

CHAPTER V.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS.
§ i. GENERAL FEATURES.

IT is in the development of trade, and especially of banking, rather than in
manufactures, that Babylonia and Chaldsea were in advance of all the rest
of the world. The most cautious Assyriologists are the least confident
in their renderings of the numerous contract tablets from which, if they
were accurately interpreted, we should certainly be able to reconstruct the
laws and usages of the world's first great market place. There are two
schools of interpretation, each deserving of respect and gratitude, which
are nowhere more strenuously opposed to each other than in the treatment
of these interesting and enigmatic documents. There are German scholars
who will not allow that a text has been interpreted unless it has been
parsed and the grammar of it explained — or perhaps corrected. And
ihere are French scholars who have happy intuitions of the meaning of
a sentence in which some of the words and most of the grammar are
unknown. The one school may add to our materials a little faster than
is safe, and the other a little more slowly than is necessary. But the
impartial critic will admit that both are right in principle.

If a comparative philologist of forty and a child of five are pitchforked
into a foreign country, it is probable that the child will be the first to
understand and make itself understood, unless the philologist has the
linguistic instinct, which is something quite different from a sound judg-
ment as to the value of phonetic and grammatical forms. The instinct,
which makes it easy to a few men to speak a score of languages as well
as their own, may be applied to the interpretation of an unknown tongue,
as well as to the acquisition of living foreign languages. Those who
"pick up "a language easily begin to speak the one they are learning
before they know it. In the case of living languages they correct them-
selves by further experience ; and in the case of tongues as dead as
Akkadian and Assyrian, their guesses need revision by the stricter
grammarians who overtake them in time. But even grammar cannot
exist in vacuo^ and a foreign language is liable to be incorrectly parsed
until its idioms are understood. It may be said of French translators as
a class, that they translate with more spirit and fidelity, in proportion to
their knowledge, than those of any other nation. And this praise, which
is of doubtful value when knowledge is to be had for the seeking, really
counts for something when the materials for exact knowledge are wanting.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 321

In the particular case of the contract tablets and similar texts, which
MM. Oppert and Revillout have attacked with more courage than other
Assyriologists, it is certainly a point in favour of the general accuracy of
their renderings that they give a view of the laws and customs of mercantile
Babylonia, which harmonises completely with all that is known of the
affinities of the earliest inhabitants. Hommel, who has not made a
special study of these texts, and is more interested in their historical
import than in the minutias of verbal interpretation, was content to base
his remarks on the work of the brothers Revillout;1 and though correc-
tions may doubtless be made from time to time by the original translators
themselves or others, in the main we may accept the stories of sales
and partnerships, loans and mortgages effected 4,000 years ago, as not
much more uncertain than other early and difficult texts, historical or
magical.

The following account of Babylonian usages is derived from the text of
M. Revillout's work, to which a general reference may suffice, points of
special interest being reserved for consideration later. It is confirmed in
essentials by the later work of Meissner, who has translated over one
hundred deeds of the age of Hammurabi and his successors.2 In
Chaldaea every kind of commodity, from land to money, circulated with
a freedom that is unknown to modern commerce ; every value was
negotiable, and there was no limit to the number and variety of the
agreements that might be entered into. In Babylon, unlike Egypt, acts
are bilateral in form as well as substance, when the nature of the case
requires it. But brick tablets did not lend themselves readily to " book-
keeping," as no further entry could be made after baking, while the first
entry was not secure unless baked at once. Each brick recorded one
transaction, and was kept by the party interested till the contract was
completed, and the destruction of the tablet was equivalent to a receipt.

Babylonian law allowed debts to be paid by assigning another person's
debt to the creditor ; a debt was property, and could be assigned without
reference to the debtor, so that any formal acknowledgment of indebted-
ness could be treated like a negotiable bill — a fact which speaks volumes
for the commercial honesty of the people. A separate tablet was, of
course, required to record the original debt, or rather to say that So-and-
so's debt to Such-an-one has been by him sold to a third party. Such
third party could again either assign his claim to a bank for a considera-
tion, or if the last debtor had a credit at the bank, the creditor could be
paid out of that, a sort of forecast of the modern clearing-house system.
The debtor who pays before the term agreed on has to receive a formal
surrender of the creditor's claim, or a transfer of it to himself. The
Babylonian regarded money and credit as synonymous, and the phrase,

1 Les Obligations en droit Egyptien compare aux autres droit s de Vantiquite, par
E. Revillout, suivies d'un Appendix sur le Droit de la Chaldee au 2^me sihle avant

J. C., par Victor et Eugene Revillout.

2 Beitrage zum Altbabylonischen Privatrecht. Bruno Meissner, 1893.

P.C. Y

322 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

" Money of Such-an-one upon So-and-so," is used as equivalent to A's
credit with B.

The form for the sale of real property, in Babylonia, was borrowed from
that of judicial sentences : it declares that the price is paid, the article
delivered; there is no going back, and a penalty of twelve times the
price is pronounced against any one who even wishes to do so. In the
later contracts the purpose of the penal clause is to bar the right of
relatives to redeem the land sold at the price paid for it. It is invoked
expressly against brothers, sons, relations, male or female, and men of the
same country, or of the same tribe or gens. Evidently by primitive
Akkadian law, as by that of most other races, the family and the tribe
had a right of pre-emption in regard to land held by any member of the
stock. When this right was found to impede the free circulation of
property, to which the commercial Babylonians attached so much im-
portance, the penal clause, by which it was barred, came to be included,
as a matter of course, in all deeds of sale ; and when, notwithstanding the
clause, it was desired to repurchase, for the family, land alienated by one
of its members, some error of form in the sale was alleged to bar the
penalty. In the Acts found at Warka, the ancient Erech, the vendor of
land not only waives the rights of his relatives, but undertakes, as in Egypt,
to protect the purchaser against all third parties.

In Babylonia all bond-fide possessions were put into circulation as
forming commercial capital, and credit was only given upon such real
security. The security being good, the rate of interest was comparatively
low, normally 20 per cent, and in some cases only 13. At Nineveh, on
the other hand, the rate of interest varied from 25 and 33 per cent, to
50 and even 100 per cent. ; the Babylonian custom of lending on pledge
not being uniformly followed, bad security involved high interest.

In ancient Babylonia, as in modern China, the normal effect of a loan
was supposed to be beneficial to the borrower. In Egypt, judging from the
form of the deeds, the idea was that the creditor asserted a claim upon
the debtor, or the debtor acknowledged a liability to the man from whom
he had borrowed. In Babylonia the personal question is scarcely con-
sidered ; one person owes money to another — that is the commonest thing
in the world — such loans are in a chronic state of being incurred and
paid off; one man's debt is another man's credit, and credit being
the soul of commerce, the loan is considered rather as a part of the
floating negotiable capital of the country than as a burden on the shoulders
of one particular debtor.

§ 2. BABYLONIAN MORTGAGES.

The most characteristic of the commercial usages of Babylonia has
already been described in connection with the Egyptian adaptation of it.1
The antichretic mortgage is found full grown in the twenty-third century

1 Ante, p. 183 fT.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 323

B.C., and its invention must be one of the earliest achievements of the
primitive Sumerian race. In one form or another it is met with in China,
Malabar, Egypt, the Berber and Basque countries ; and, finally, under
the name of " a Welsh mortgage," has got itself recognised in British law
books.1 It is so important and characteristic a feature in Babylonian law
that it deserves the first place now.

There are a number of contracts containing the formula : " There is no
rent for the property and no interest for the money." 2 A lease of land
or houses in Babylonia was often exchanged for the use, during the same
time, of a sum of money 3 of equivalent value, the rent and the interest
being set against each other. These contracts take us back to the natural
foundation of the practice of " paying interest " upon loans. When the
habit of owning property is formed, a distinction is drawn between articles
which have a momentary value in use, such as food, and those which in
their nature tend to multiply, and therefore are worth, prospectively, more
than their present value for consumption. The typical example is the
measure of corn which can be ground to make bread now, or used to sow
a field to make more corn next season. The progress of trade causes
silver to be accepted as a general standard of value and medium of
exchange, and therefore, though it does not multiply itself in this way, it
can at any moment be exchanged for corn, cattle, land, or other articles
which are naturally productive.

The man who lends or leases land surrenders the enjoyment of its
prospective produce, which, of course, is estimated by the average pro
ductiveness of similar land. The man who lends or leases silver in the
same way surrenders the prospective command of a corresponding amount
of any other kind of productive property liable to come into the market,
and accordingly the produce of money, as the Babylonians called it,
would naturally be reckoned by the average productiveness of the com-
modities in which it might be invested. There was nothing unreasonable
or intrinsically oppressive in this arangement, and it does not imply any
standing inequality in the position of the two parties to it. To use
phrases which have acquired their associations under another regime : the
man who is the tenant from one point of view, is the capitalist from the
other ; he who, on the one hand, occupies the inferior status of debtor or
borrower, on the other is the landlord, and that in a country where real
property might advance rapidly in value.

In Malabar, where all varieties and degrees of the Babylonian mortgage
are to be met with, we are also confronted with the paradox of a feudal
lord who is technically his tenant's debtor • and a tenant at will, who holds
a mortgage on his landlord's estate ; and these phases of the same archaic
institution justify the inference drawn as to its character in Babylonia.
When the cultivating occupier is habitually a poor man, and the money-

1 Appendix C. : "Welsh Mortgages." a Les Obligations, etc., p. 92.

3 I.e. a certain weight of silver, coined money being as little known in Babylon as in
Egypt.

324 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

lending capitalist a rich one, the bargain between the two is apt to be
unequal. The destruction of the poor is their poverty; just because the
cultivator's pursuit is, as a rule, comparatively unremunerative, if he is
compelled to borrow, he must pay for the accommodation as much as will
induce persons engaged in more remunerative pursuits to lend to him.
Whether from the fertility of the soil, the distribution of property, or the
social and domestic customs of the country, it is evident that in Babylonia,
while landowners borrowed and mortgaged freely, they were not an im-
poverished class. In Egyptian enumerations of property to be sold or
settled, the modern formula is " all the goods that I possess now or may
acquire hereafter ; " but the corresponding Babylonian formula, which
corresponds to the one early Egyptian text of the kind,1 says " all my pro-
perty in town or country."

The well-to-do Babylonian had a house and garden in town, and fields and
plantations in the country. The world-famous towns of Sumer and Akkad,
like the Egyptian nouit and the Chinese village, contained the dwellings of a
community which drew its support from the surrounding fields. This is the
way in nearly all agricultural communities, and the only feature peculiar to
Babylonia is the rapid growth of the cities, planted on the canals by which
the plains were irrigated. The inscriptions habitually contrast the arable land
which (owing to its being subject to inundation) is unfit for habitation, and
the cities where men dwell. The number of the cities, in proportion to the
area of the State, enabled them to contain a majority of the population,
and at the same time to include so many whose interest and means of
subsistence lay in the country, that the contrast or rivalry between towns-
men and rustics as such perhaps hardly existed. A great deal of landed
property, for instance, was held by bankers ; men who wished to invest
their capital in the culture of corn, oil, dates, or flowers for scent, gave
their money to the banker to use in trade, and received, instead, the right
to cultivate, for a given term or sine die, a corresponding piece of land.

The Babylonian did not willingly sell the lands he had received from
his fathers ; on the contrary, it is common for brothers, in dividing the
family estate, to boast that they have added to it. But the more numerous
and various their enterprises, the more impossible it became for them
always to occupy the hereditary plot. They did not wish to sell, and it
is significant and instructive to learn that, under these circumstances, the
natural thing in Babylonia was to pledge or mortgage the land rather than,
as we should say, to let it. The candidates for land must, therefore, as a
rule, have been moneyed men. The use of the land was given by a would-
be trader, in exchange for the use of the money given by a would-be
cultivator ; and the Sumerian-Semitic vocabularies in which the commercial
common-places of that old world are enshrined, ring the changes accord-
ingly upon the phrase : " House against money they have made equal."
" They have established the equivalent of a field (or a garden, or a slave),
in money."

1 Ante, p. 203.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 325

This system of exchanges is more ancient than the contracts which we
call respectively leases and mortgages. The owner in any case surrenders
the use of his land, just as much as if he gave it in pledge, and the dis-
tinction turns upon the ability of the person acquiring the temporary use
to pay for it in full at once. If he does so— and in Babylonia this was
the normal arrangement — the bargain is one for the exchange of use, for
which it is convenient to borrow the Greek term, antichresis. If not, the
value of the land is paid by instalments, in advance, and these payments
no doubt serve as the first historic example of a real rent. In the rest of
the Old World the idea of rent, as a payment due to landed proprietors
from the cultivating class, seems to have begun with the payment of a
land tax to a political superior ; but in Babylonia, where every imaginable
form of contract seems to have been recognised or invented, rent, in the
wider sense, commercial as well as agricultural, had come into existence
in this form. When the money equivalent of the article leased was paid
by instalments, i.e. as rent, the Babylonian contracts stipulated for a
penalty of double the yearly rent in case of unpunctuality. And this
again is characteristic : the landlord has no lien on the tenant's real pro-
perty ; he enters into this kind of contract because he wants money, not
farm produce (which is all the right of distraint would give him), and there-
fore a money fine suits him best.

Babylonian law also recognises pledges given merely as security, without
their value in use being set against the interest of the debt, and in that
case the debtor could free himself at any time by paying off the loan ; but
in the reciprocal or antichretic borrowings the repayment had to be made
at a date agreed on. As in Egypt, if the goods were pledged to their full
value, and the loan was not paid off when due, they passed by previous
stipulation to the mortgagee. One contract sufficed to acknowledge the
debt, give the pledge for repayment, and transfer the ownership of the
thing pledged in default of such payment, while in Egypt a final separate
deed of transfer was always needed.

A pledge may be pledged again, or sold or let ; thus the right to dispose
for a time of the services of a slave can circulate like a banknote or a
piece of silver. When the owner of the slave pays off his original liability,
the money passes from hand to hand, extinguishing all the engagements
in which the slave had stood for the cash.

One is tempted to ask whether the " taking a pledge," which is so pro-
minent a transaction among the ancient Jews, is not a Semitic corruption
of the just and humane antichresis of primitive Babylonia. When the
article pledged was of use to the debtor and not to the creditor, its sur-
render implies loss to the former without any corresponding benefit to the
latter, beyond what he might obtain by a deed of conditional transfer.
The first form of security recognised was, no doubt, the exchange of use ;
the second, a promise to complete the exchange of ownership under
specified conditions.

It is even possible that the payment of interest, as well as the payment

326 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

of rent, may have begun with developments of the common antichretic
contract. In some cases the owner of land, while pledging his property
for a capital sum, did not desire to give up possession of it. In that case
he might rent it from his creditor for a sum of money estimated as
equivalent to the profit to be derived from the use of the property ; and
as this sum was calculated to equal the profit derived from the use of the
money borrowed, he would really be paying interest on the loan, while
keeping possession of the land as in the ordinary mortgage. If the debtor
failed to pay the interest, he would still have between himself and the
catastrophe of being sold up, the intermediate stage of a temporary sur-
render of his real estate. The creditor was supposed to derive the same
profit from the rent, or interest, his debtor pays under these circumstances,
as he would if employing some one to cultivate for him after taking posses-
sion himself. Even the rich land of Mesopotamia and the Nile was not
expected to bear more than one profit ; but this profit was enough to cover
the wages or maintenance of the cultivating agent.

In Babylonia, third parties — usually, of course, bankers — often undertake
to pay money at a given date for the person acknowledging a debt; and
another kind of accommodation might be obtained. Supposing a person,
or a firm, desired to purchase a property, and could only raise half the
price, they applied to some capitalist to act as rasutanu?- that is, " ar-
ranger," or (temporary) possessor. They gave to him the money they
could command at once, and he advanced the remainder, and effected
the purchase in their name ; but till the advance was paid off, he retained
possession of the property. In effect the intermediary got the use of the
whole property in exchange for half the price ; and as he presumably did
not want it himself, he might leave it in the hands of the vendor, receiving
from him rent or interest proportioned to the whole price. If it was so
left, when the real purchaser was ready to claim it, the rasutanu ceded his
claim on the vendor, and after due declaration before the royal scribe the
transfer was completed. The arrangement was really one of mutual ad-
vantage; for if the rasutanu got double interest on his money for a time,
his client was enabled to make sure of a desired purchase at the con-
venient moment.

The Greeks, and especially the Athenians, used and gave a name to the
Babylonian form of mortgage. M. Revillout quotes a Greek inscription
in which a private person stipulates that, in consideration of a sum he has
paid into the city treasury, he shall be allowed to graze his flocks on its
public pastures ; 2 and in this case, just as in the corresponding Baby-
lonian contracts, it is an open question whether the equivalent of the
money paid is to be regarded as interest, or the money itself as rent. In
Greece, if land was mortgaged as a security, but not given up, the mort-
gagee might secure himself against the claims of later creditors by taking
possession, and in general, the institution, which we must suppose to have

1 Les Obligations, etc., p. 157.

2 Ib., p. 104.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 327

been borrowed from disciples of Babylonia,1 lost its character for modera-
tion and mutuality in their hands. The father of Demosthenes had lent
money to the owner of a shop with slaves, receiving the shop as a "going
concern " by way of security ; and it appears from the account of his in-
heritance that the shop paid on an average the equivalent of 33 per cent,
on the original loan.

In Babylonia, where the rate of interest was comparatively moderate, it
was not limited by law. Compound interest was not illegal, but a special
contract was needed to enforce its payment, and any unpaid interest was
regarded as forming a fresh capital, to secure which a fresh pledge had to
be taken, as the original pledge did not become more deeply involved by
accruing interest. If the creditor became uneasy, he might from time to
time demand fresh sureties for repayment ; and as strangers did not stand
security, only relatives, their doing so made the whole property of the
family available to secure the debt of one member. This explains the im-
possibility of strangers acting, as no one could answer for the member of
another family, who might have to answer for any number of relatives
of his own.

The evidence adduced by M. Revillout in support of the above con-
clusions is of two, or rather three, kinds. There are a variety of ancient
bi-lingual texts containing laws, legal formulas, and the phrases most com-
monly used in commercial transactions ; there are a number of contract
tablets found at Warka, belonging to the period of the kings Rim-sin,
Hammurabi, and Samsi-iluna ; and there are a variety of contracts and other
tablets dating from the later Assyrian and Babylonian monarchy, which in
some cases help to explain the earlier documents. Intermediate authorities
will, no doubt, be unearthed in course of time ; but in the main we may
assume that there was no serious breach of continuity between the com-
position of the Sumerian law-texts — which must be at least 1,000 years
older than Hammurabi — and the revival of Babylonian independence
following the fall of Assyria. Nineveh as well as Babylon had borrowed
its law from the ancient cities of the south, and the pains taken to preserve
a knowledge of the primitive Sumerian language bear witness to the con-
tinued validity of title deeds and legal formulas composed in it.

§ 3. ANCIENT TITLE DEEDS AND CONTRACTS OF THE FIRST
BABYLONIAN DYNASTY.

It is owing, no doubt, to their serving as title deeds that the tablets
about to be described were preserved. Every person who sold land gave
over with it the tablet which recorded his own purchase, as well as all
earlier records ; hence it is possible, even now, to trace with extraordinary
exactness the fortunes of a few specific plots of ground. From upwards

1 It was probably derived from the pre-Hellenic maritime nations of the Mediter-
ranean, whose kinship with the primitive inhabitants of Babylonia is discussed subse-
quently.

328 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

of thirty deeds analysed by MM. Revillout we take the following par-
ticulars, which, if somewhat tedious in themselves, yet deserve attention
as the oldest records of the kind preserved in any country of the world.

In the reign of Rim-sin (otherwise Riagu), king of Larsa, certain property
which had been held jointly by three persons, Ilani-erba,1 Ubar-sin, and
Mikrat-sin, was divided among them by deed, each receiving a house, a
slave, and a piece of garden and field. They were not brothers, for the
fathers of two of them are mentioned. M. Revillout supposes them to
have been members of a commercial partnership, but this view also has
its difficulties, as will be seen later. Ilani-erba went through the form of
renouncing his mother by deed; he said to her, "Thou art not my mother,"
and she said to him, "Thou art not my son;" and, as in other cases, it is
probable that this form was gone through to bar the claim he must other-
wise have had to an equal share of her inheritance. He had presumably
received his portion in advance, perhaps in connection with the property
he held jointly with Ubarsin and Mikratsin.

Ilani-erba had two sons, and Mikratsin one. The former, Sini-nana and
Apil-ilani, by a third deed,2 buy a piece of cultivated land from the latter,
Minanu, and his son Ilani-ituram. This plot is described as adjoining
that held collectively by the sons of Ubarsin. The next deed shows us
these five sons of Ubarsin dividing their property, consisting of houses,
land, corn, silver, and some choice product called nis. The eldest son,
called Ihi-Samas, took rather a smaller share of the buildings and rather a
larger share of the land than the others : his share adjoins that of Ilani-
erba. The house property divided by the brothers is about twice as much
as their father had under the first deed of partition.

Still in the reign of Rim-sin, Sin-azu, mentioned above as a neighbour
of Minanu, appears in another deed as buying two sars of land.

Sin-bel-saan, brother of Ilani-erba, bought from the latter and two other
brothers a house, gardens, and plantation, "after the death of their father,"
so that Ilani-erba had not renounced his paternal inheritance. The renun-
ciation of future claims on the mother's estate was not impossibly con-
nected with a second marriage on her part, an occurrence which the next
deeds bring before us.

1 Hommel transliterates Ilu-irba, and calls the son Sini-Istar, instead of Sini-nana, but
it will be convenient throughout to give the names after M. Revillout.

2 As a specimen of these documents it may be given at length, Hommel having trans-
lated it after Revillout. "A garden and house, outlying property; on one side the house
of Sini-istar, on one side the house the hereditary share of the sons of Ubar-sin ; at one
end the street, at one end the house of Sin-azu ; Sini-istar, the son of Ilu-irba and Apil-
ili his brother have fixed the price with Minani, son of Migrat-sin and Ilu-itura, his son :
3! mina of silver as its full price he has paid. For distant clays, for future times, he
shall not transgress or depart from (the agreement). , The name of his king he shall
invoke. Witnesses: N. the scribe; I. the notary, and eight others. His tablet agrees
with the tablet of the witnesses. (Curiously, the literal rendering of the latter word by
M. Revillout is "conjuror"). In the month Sebat, on the 26th day, in the year that
Riagu the king, the enemies and adversary [overthrew ?]. Tablet of Iriba-sin. Tablet
of Idin-Samas. Seals of R. son of A., and of I. son of A. servant of the god. . . .
— Gesch. B. und A., p. 381. Les Obligations, p. 277.

Meissner, No. 34, records a supplementary sale in which the parties are the same.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 329

The sons of Zazia, in the reign of Rim-sin, mortgaged a house by
antichresis to Sinimgurani, son of Ibbatum. The third of these sons of
Zazia, Pirhoum, married a lady, Lamazou, who became, by a second
marriage, the wife of Ilani-erba. The mortgage is paid off in another
deed, by which she gives money, slaves, and a bill to her three sons
(Sinisamas, Sinmubanit, and Saribuum) by other husbands, they renouncing
all claims on the inheritance, which she reserves for Ilani-erba's children,
Sininana, Apililani, and their two sisters. A receipt for ten shekels, given
by Sinisamas, for the share deposited for him with his brothers, Sini-istar
and Apilili, is also published by Meissner.1

Then we have a deed by which the sons of Pirhoum sell the house he
had bought, to their half-brothers Sininana and Apililani. This house
was bordered on one side by land belonging to Sinazu, but this is bought
from his children by Sininana and Ibbasin.

There was a dispute between the purchasers, which the judges ended
by declaring that two-thirds of the property belonged to Sininana, and
one-third to Ibbasin. Sinimgurani, a son of Pirhoum, was the witness
whose evidence decided the case. Sininana then executes another deed
to exchange the "house of Ubaatum" for Ibbasin's share of Sinazu's
land. But the sons of Pirhoum object to the terms of the exchange,
alleging that a house included in their sale has not been reckoned ; and as
their intervention was allowed, we must suppose the sale by them not
to have become absolute yet. These deeds are dated in the reign of
Hammurabi, whose name is invoked with those of the gods Samas and
Merodach.

In the same reign, Muhadum, son of Sinazu, sells cultivated land to
Anasinemid, Pirhoum being mentioned as a neighbour ; and a grandson
of the same worthy, while his father was still living, sold a piece of land
to Sininana and Apililani. The five sons of Pirhoum sell land collectively
to their half-brothers, and some of them sell or mortgage individually
besides. The latter deeds have the form of sales, but are cancelled sub-
sequently on repayment of the purchase money ; and, in fact, it seems
almost as if the Babylonian mortgage originated with the idea that a man
himself, no less than his kinsfolk, had a right to revoke a sale, or buy back
the property alienated, i.e. that all cessions of ancestral property were
naturally temporary.

Some of the property, belonging to Ilani-erba and his partners in the
original association of three, must have remained undivided, for, in the
reign of Samsi-iluna or of Hammurabi, their children divide by deed a
quantity of cultivated land, each share of which is more than five times
as much as the gardens of their fathers. A suit was brought by Iri-baam-
sin, the second son of Ubarsin, and his younger brothers, against the sons
of Ilani-erba, respecting the house and land which they had bought from
the sons of Pirhoum \ but Sininana made oath in a temple that he had
bought them with money derived from his mother and not from common

1 No. 27.

330 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

funds, and the declaration was received as decisive. In a further action
about the ownership of four slaves, two were adjudged to him and two
to Iribaamsin. These were probably friendly suits, for shortly afterwards
Sininana stands security for Iribaamsin and his brothers, to the value of a
camel, dates, and some palace nis. As strangers, according to M. Revil-
lout, did not stand surety, this is an argument for their being relations ;
their fathers perhaps were cousins, though not brothers ; or they may
have been half-brothers, on the mother's side.

The land of Sinazu, sold to Anasinemid, is sold again in the reigft of
Samsi-iluna, by him and his two sons, to Sininana and his brother. The
price had risen between the first and second sale from $\ mina to 5^-. In
later sales by this family, now one son acts and now another, as if they
had already divided the inheritance, each still being partner with his father
for his share. A deed by which Sininana and his brother pay 9! mina for
a piece of ground, the hereditary share of Siri-hinam is worth notice,
because another deed four months later records a further payment of two
mina by the same, to the same for the same ; in this, as in cases when the
two payments are much further apart, the first advance was evidently of
the nature of a mortgage which might be paid off.

One more purchase by the brothers, from Sininana's old partner Ibbasin,
may be mentioned, because the land he sells to them had been bought by
him from Etelkasin, whom we know as a father who renounced his son.
Etelkasin and his wife acted together in endowing their eldest son and in
forisfamiliating another, so that in considering the purport of this trans-
action, we must bear in mind that it was a very common one.

The above deeds, which are only specimens of a large class, are suffi-
cient to show the character of the business transactions in vogue 4,000
years ago. As to their scale, M. Revillout has added together the sums
paid by Sininana, according to all the tablets in which the figures are
complete,1 and without counting others, as to which this is not the case,
the transactions in which he was concerned amount to a sum of nearly
two talents of silver — or as much as the taxes paid by some first-class cities
to the kings of Assyria. Of course this represents the turnover, not the
capital of the Erech banking firm, Sininana and Apililani Bros., and
many of the purchases of land, with which he is credited, were really only
advances on Babylonian mortgage or antichresis, never intended to
proceed to a real sale.

Sininana is proved to have been a banker, by a tablet respecting money
deposited with him by Zikrum and Zabitum; the record has been preserved
because the parties owed money to Sininana, and he wished for authority
to apply their deposit in liquidation of the debt. The banker took, and
kept, a receipt when he repaid a deposit or gave the cash equivalent for
the use of land (Meissner, Nos. 28, 29), but it was stipulated on the receipt
that the original contract should be broken. Apililani seems to have been
a sleeping partner in the concern; the joint property of the brothers
1 There are, however, different readings of the figures given.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 331

probably supplied the capital of the firm, but the mere fact that they
had not divided their inheritance is hardly a sufficient reason for supposing
a commercial partnership to have existed. In nearly every transaction we
find two or more parties concerned, and the obvious explanation is that
joint ownership was the rule among members of the same family. It
seems therefore, to say the least of it, possible that the partnership be-
tween Ilani-erba, Ubarsin, and Migratsin may have had its origin in
such relationship. If it was a merely personal association for trading
purposes, one does not see why the property of the associates should have
continued to be held in common by their children, who on this hypothesis
would not be related. If, however, they were sons of the same mother by
different fathers, or were the sons of brothers who had not divided the
property received from their father, the association would be explained,
and that in a way more consistent with the nature of the only acts
ascribed to it.

In the later Babylonian deeds, in which we certainly have to do with
commercial partnerships, the property of the family and the firm sometimes
get intermingled. For instance, when the father had been in business,
his share of its capital and profits passed to his sons, of whom perhaps
only one cared to succeed him as a partner. The other sons might, and
sometimes did, leave the administration of their shares, to some extent, in
the hands of the man of business of the family ; and if M. Revillout is
right in supposing the house of Ilanierba and Company to have repre-
sented a commercial rather than a family partnership, it is clear that the
business passed into the hands of his eldest son, Sininana, subject to the
obligation to pay off the other partners or their descendants.

According to M. Oppert, the earliest antichretic mortgage recorded
belongs to the reign before Rim-sin : \\ sar of dwelling house is exchanged
for i^ mina of silver; the money is said to represent the house, and
is repaid when, after eight years' occupancy, the house itself is restored.
In two other cases, when a house is held for eight years, and two sars
of land for ten years, the amount of money accepted as equivalent is
not named. And of course there is no mention, as in later Ninevite con-
tracts, of the rate of interest to which the enjoyment of the property is
considered equivalent. These two deeds are also given by Meissner,1
who tries to interpret them as mere agreements to rent on the very
disadvantageous footing of an English building lease, i.e. for the tenant
to repair or put up the necessary dwellings and surrender them on the
expiry of the term. The precise meaning of one word is doubtful, but
the sense of two clauses is clear; that the tenant's term of occupancy
expires in ten years, after which " on the house and the dwelling he has
no claim." Such a clause seems uncalled for in a lease of modern type,
in which it would be taken for granted that possession was given up
when the term for which rent had been agreed upon (and paid in advance)
expired ; but if the normal agreement, so to speak, was a mortgage, the

1 Nos. 66 and 67.

332 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

tenant would not go out, even at the date fixed by contract, unless he
had been repaid the capital sum, the usufruct of which was regarded as
equivalent to the usufruct of the house and land.

Instances of ordinary lettings are fairly common, and the marked differ-
ence in form between them and these deeds is most intelligible on the
Oppert-Revillout theory. When a house alone is rented in the ordinary
way, the only point of interest to be noted is the rent, which seems to have
averaged a shekel yearly. We have three examples of that rate, in one of
which one-third was to be paid in advance, as against one rent of five-
sixths, one of one-half, one of one-third and IC-SE ; and that of one man-
sion,— clearly belonging to an heiress, as it is let by a woman and her
brother (in that order) — let for two shekels, half a shekel or a quarter's
rent to be paid in advance.1

The rent of land was evidently in some way associated with the rate of
agricultural interest ; and as there is no difficulty about the interpretation of
the tablets respecting loans, it will be convenient to take these first. Out of
eighteen loans recorded, five are from private persons, who lend money to
be repaid, without interest, at harvest, the amounts ranging from one-sixth of
a shekel to sixteen shekels ; in two cases the money is borrowed for harvest
expenses, i.e. wages of harvest labourers, so the loan must be for a short
term, and in one case it is borrowed for food, for a fortnight. In three
cases corn or money is lent till harvest, free of interest, by a woman de-
scribed as Priestess of Samas. Money is lent once and corn twice direct
from the treasury of Samas on the same terms. Once money is lent by a
private person and once by a priestess, with the stipulation that the interest
shall be paid to the god Samas ; once a priestess of the god lends till
harvest, when both principal and interest are to be paid to the god, and
once a private person lends 1,440 ka of corn to be repaid, without interest,
in two months' time to the god, not the lender. In addition to these three
cases in which interest is to be paid, but is not exacted by the lender, we
have two examples of purely commercial transactions — half a mina bor-
rowed, for which interest is to be paid at the customary rate of 20 per
cent., and no ka of corn borrowed, for which interest is to be paid at the
rate of 100 for 300. 2

All these transactions have their interest for us. The treasuries of the
gods evidently served as a standing "house of abundance," to which the
needy cultivator might apply in his recurring weeks or months of scarcity.
Money lending could not thrive injuriously in a community where the
largest capitalist — for who could compete with the great gods in wealth ? —
habitually lent gratis. And at the same time, the fact that the poor could
always borrow from somebody else, may have helped to render those, who
had money or corn to spare, willing to lend like the gods. It was clearly
not the correct thing for well-to-do persons to take interest for loans of
seed-corn or money, for harvest expenses, the demand for which proved

1 Meissner, Nos. 62, 68, 71 ; 70, 63, 64, 69.

2 16., Nos. 8-25.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 333

the cultivator to be hard up ; and it is reasonable to suppose that when the
personal relationship between lender and borrower was close and friendly,
the payment of interest was waived without sense of degrading obligation.
But the case might occur of farmers on a fairly large scale, who needed
temporary accommodation, and could afford to pay for it at the market rate ;
it would be beneath their dignity to borrow for nothing; as it was beneath
the dignity of wealthy ladies and gentlemen to lend at interest ; so, as now,
a fastidious suitor, who has been awarded damages in a Court of law, will
pay them over to the County Hospital, the gentlemanly thing, in primitive
Babylonia, was to agree to let your debtor pay interest to the temple, which
used its spare funds in lending again. So the borrower would not "lose face,"
and the temple treasury would be replenished, while no doubt the god was
indulgent in the case of bad debts. A still more effective and pleasingly
modest form of charity was to lend the corn required free of interest, on
condition of the principal being paid to the temple funds ; or, as there are
two ways of looking at everything, we may imagine that prosperous
borrowers, who were too ready to trade on their neighbours' liberality,
might be constrained to repay money that they might otherwise be willing
to retain, by the stipulation that it belonged to Samas, and not to the
lender.

The purpose for which the money or corn is borrowed, is generally
stated with engaging frankness, and of course the gods and their imitators
could only be expected to lend without interest for beneficial uses. Tiles
and oil, as well as corn, are lent without interest for a specified term — in the
case of the oil till thesesamum harvest. In one case half a minaand eight
shekels are given for the maintenance of the recipient, but with the
proviso, which Meissner thinks cruel, that the money is to be repaid when —
or if — asked for f but the stipulation probably means, what we are told goes
without saying in modern China, that if a man who gave when he was
rich becomes poor, those to whom he had given should repay him if they
can. Many of the tablets in the cases of the British Museum refer to
loans from temples, and we may certainly infer from them a sub-
stantial continuity of custom throughout the whole duration of the power
of Babylon, or rather, from before the foundation of that city to the period
of its decline. In 648 B.C., in the reign of Samas-sum-ukin, one Remat lent
five-sixths of a mina to M. M. and K. his wife " for necessities. In the
day when the face of the land sprouts (again), the money, five-sixths of a
mina, in its full amount, M. M. and K. shall repay to Remat." The names
of six witnesses follow, including a son of the borrower, a " son of the
potter," and a scribe. A memorandum is added, to say that want and
famine are in the land, and the people are dying for want of food.2
Evidently want of food was at all times regarded as a sufficient ground for
a loan without interest " till the land sprouts." Probably the reason for
specifying the object of the loan is always to distinguish between loans

1 73., No. 19.

2 Records^ N.S., iv. p. 97. (Translation by Mr. Pinches.)

334 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

for necessity and loans for profit, the latter of which were naturally also '
numerous in a commercial country, and bore interest at well-known
customary rates.

These rates are plainly derived from the pre-Semitic inhabitants, as the
way in which they are calculated shows. The interest on the half mina in
the loan mentioned above, is said to be at the rate of 12 shekels per
mina, and in the more numerous later deeds, when the rate of interest is
mentioned, it is as one shekel per mina per month ; but as there are 60
shekels to a mina, this twelve per soss answers in form and substance to
our 20 per cent. This was the legal rate, in the sense that it was the
rate assumed to be due in the absence of other special agreement. In one
of the bi-lingual tablets of Assurbanipal, it is laid down that " the interest
of the city payable in silver is in all, two ik on one drachm, two drachms on
ten drachms, and twelve drachms on one mina." * The word drachm itself
(darag mana— one-sixtieth or one degree of a mina), shows that the
divisions of money, like those of time, were ultimately derived from the
primitive population of Chaldasa.

But while the normal interest on money was one in five, or 20 per
cent., that on com was, as in Egypt, one in three, 33^ per cent, or
20 per soss, a proportion which is certainly more likely to have suggested
iiselt to a people counting by sixties than by tens or hundreds. This fact,
which is one of the strongest arguments in favour of a common origin for
Egyptian and Babylonian law, was guessed at by the brothers Revillout,2
on the strength of a deed from the eighth year of Nabonidus, by which a
farmer in debt to Iddinamarduk, acknowledges himself as owing for prin-
cipal and interest of a loan, 133 cor, 2 ephahs of corn, or just the amount
which would have been due in Egypt on a loan of 100 cor. The contract
now printed,3 promising interest at the rate of one in three on a loan of no
ka of corn, shows both that the conjecture was right, and that this rate of
interest dates from the earliest times.

No explanation has yet been given of the existence or origin of this
special rate, and none such is likely to be furnished by Egyptian records
of any kind. There are, however, several tablets concerning leases, of
which no very clear rendering has yet been given, which would perhaps
become more intelligible if we could find in them also a key to the rate of
agricultural interest. In three of them, the land is let for three years ;
four gan of field are let for three years or for one-third share ; 4 a field is
let to three people to cultivate for three years, for two years they pay 300
ka of corn per gan. " Rent must be paid for the third harvest. They
shall build the dwelling together. On the day of harvest they shall divide
all the corn that is there." 5 And again a field is rented for three years to
plough, reap, and cultivate.6 In all imperfectly understood languages, to

1 Les Obligations ', p. 55. 2 /£., p. 446..

3 Meissner, No. 23. Besides the intrinsic importance of the discovery, it is a valuable
testimony to the soundness of M. Revillout's method, and the acuteness of his judgment.

4 Meissner, No. 72. 5 2b.t No. .75.. v , , '. _. 6 /A, No. 77.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 335

know what is meant is a great assistance in discovering what is said, and
the translation of the second and most interesting of these texts might
doubtless be improved if we knew the nature of the agreement contem-
plated.

In an important tablet dealing with the cultivation of the land, we find
the phrase, " At the time of cultivation, he divided the field, he made
three parts." This seems to have been the normal division, answering to
" the custom of the city," as distinguished from special arrangements as to
the share of the produce given by a cultivator to a landowner. Was this
a variation on a primitive custom of taking land to cultivate for three years,
one year's harvest being paid as rent ? There are three elements go to
make the crop — corn, land, and labour. The labourer sometimes required
to borrow one and sometimes the other ; if he paid a third of the produce
for the land as a yearly rent, giving up the land at the end of the term,
what more natural than that he should pay at the same rate for the bor-
rowed seed-corn, one-third yearly (as interest), while the principal, like the
land, was given back when the term expired ? To us, no doubt, such an
arrangement seems to exaggerate the value of the corn as compared with
the land, but in the early days of agriculture, seed-corn may be actually
harder to come by at the time of sowing than land ; and as, in Babylonia,
we find land constantly coming into the hands of new owners, who at all
events will not have the seed for their new purchase on the spot, the
borrowing of corn may have been practically but a buying by instalments,
and the apparently high interest an equivalent for the cost of the preced-
ing harvest, and the locking up of capital involved in storing grain for six
months from harvest to seed time.

Other forms of agreement were in use, but two clauses in the ancient
Babylonian Agricultural Precepts l show that rents, as we should call
them, were calculated to some extent by the analogy of interest. In the
first column, describing a form of tenure the description of which is un-
fortunately missing, the last paragraph runs : " For every sixty measures of
grain the farmer takes eight measures, wheat produce, straw in stocks,
grain thrashed and winnowed." Eight per soss, between 12 and 13
per cent, is the lowest rate of interest in general use, standing perhaps
to the normal twelve per soss as 3 per cent, to 5 per cent, with us.
In the second column, of which also the heading is lost, we read: " When
the time of working comes, in a field of fifths the farmer takes one part ; "
that is to say by one common type of agreement, the farmer (? the owner)
takes twelve per soss, the ordinary rate of interest for his share.

The text proceeds, according to Mr. Benin's translation : " As for the
other divisions, he takes the percentage according to the division. In a
field of a third, he takes a third. In a field of a fourth, he takes a fourth.
In a field of a fifth, he takes a fifth. In a field of a tenth, he takes a tenth."
The case of the field of a third, and a field of a fifth, have been considered

1 Records of the Fast, N.S., vol. iii. p. 94 ff.

336 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

already ; so that the only percentages named which do not correspond to
regular rates of interest are the field of a fourth and that of a tenth, the
last of which again has a counterpart in the tithe, reserved according to the
same tablet, for the royal palace. The third column repeats the enumera-
tion of " various kinds of divisions," meaning, no doubt, various tenures,
taking their name from the division of crops contemplated under them. It
is from the sense only that we have to judge whether the share specified is
that of the cultivator or the landlord ; but as agreements are described for
giving him half the produce when he contributes half the seed and labour,
as well as the land, it is scarcely likely that he should ever take four-fifths
of the produce for the land alone.

There are two headings, rendered "a field of half " and "a field of
partnership " respectively ; the translation of the first will probably be im-
proved in time, but it may be taken to describe an arrangement by which
the tenant does all the work and the landlord finds all the capital, while
at harvest the crop is inspected by the owner, who, to judge from the
heading, gives half the crop as the wages of labour. In the " field of
partnership" the contributions of the cultivator and of " the lord of the
field " are in all respects equal ; that is to say, they share equally in the
expenses of seed-corn, oxen, and harvest labour. Unfortunately, the para-
graph describing the division of the crop is wanting, but it is probably still
halved, the difference between the two cases being that, in the partnership,
as in a pure metayage, the landlord shares in all expenses and the tenant in
all profits, while in the other case the cultivator finds nothing but labour,
and has no share in the profits of the farming stock. If this be thought
too much like a distinction without a difference, Assyriologists might be
invited to try a rendering which should make the first clause apply to a
metayer tenancy, and the second to an agreement for joint cultivation, like
that of Meissner's contract, No. 75.

Such an emendation, however, does not seem necessary in the face of
the next tablet,1 by which four gan of standing corn, part of the lands of
Samas, the field of Arad Ulmassitu, the son of Taribu, is rented by Arad
Ulmassitu and Amil Mirra, the son of Usati, for one year to cultivate.
" They shall build the dwelling together (?). At the day of harvest they
shall give back the field (?) and ' like right, like left ' (i.e. in equal shares)
pay the corn of the rent of the field. They shall give up the dwelling
and share the stock in equal parts." The translator asks whether Arad
Ulmassitu, the tenant, is a different person, of the same name as the
landlord ; but the agreement described resembles very closely that con-
templated by the law tablet under the name of the " field of partnership,"
and it is quite intelligible as a contract between landowner as such and
himself as co-tenant with a working partner. He takes the rent in one
capacity, and in the other pays half of it and takes half the rest of the
produce. The arrangement is like that of the Egyptian higu priest, who
sells to the high priest (himself) his own personal share in certain priestly

1 No/76.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 337

emoluments ; and by drawing the contract in this form one tablet served
instead of two.

In other cases where land is rented for one year, the amount to be paid
is mentioned in the contract, in lieu of a rate of percentage. Thus nine
gan of standing corn are let at the rate of 1,800 ka for ten gan, by two
women curiously described as priestesses of Samas and sisters of Arad Sin
and his daughters. Tablets relating to the sale of lands and houses are of
course useful in illustrating prices and measures, but do not add to our
knowledge of Babylonian law. A house is bought from three people for
one-third mina, four and a half shekels ; another bought by one woman
from another costs one-third mina, five shekels ; ten gin of house are
bought for fifteen shekels.1 Sometimes it is said that "a full price "has
been paid, but the amount is not stated ; perhaps as the tablet is a record
of the sale, not a contract to pay, it was more important to state that
nothing remained due, than to record how much had been paid. In
more than one tablet about sales and leases, there is a reference to some
thing left over according to a former tablet, and in the case of sales of
house property especially, it might be material to guard against the claim
that a full price had not been paid, i.e. that the land had only been
pledged, not sold. The bi-lingual lists of commercial phrases have a
special phrase for "a perfect price " in contradistinction, no doubt both to
the earnest money paid in advance and to the partial price advanced on
security.

Exchanges of land and houses were common, especially in connection
with the divisions of family property. In two such exchanges the parties
swear by the name of the city of Sippara as well as by the gods. One of
them is really picturesque. Two brothers exchange land held by them in
common ; they swear by Samas, Merodach, the king Hammurabi and the
town of Sippara, that one brother will love the other ; i.e. that they will
not quarrel or go to law about the matter. The tablet is dated, incompletely
but appropriately, " the fifth Tammuz of the year that King Hammurabi,
the heart of the world in justice . . . "2 In one case there is an
exchange with a balance paid in money. The taking the city to witness
along with the king and the gods is very interesting and archaic, and the
fact that it appears twice, in connection with the disposal of what is pro-
bably ancestral family property, suggests that such sales may have required
special formality and publicity, as when Ephron the Hittite sells his field
to Abraham, for the price named in the audience of the sons of Heth, in
the presence of the children of Heth.

It is possible that there were some ancient maxims of the law, preserved
by tradition and liable to be quoted from time to time in legal decisions as
formal laws might be in code-governed countries. Some sayings trans-
lated by M. Oppert seem to be of this type ; e.g. " The judge will not
give justice to him who will not hear his own conscience ; " or, again :
" He who does not divide his succession does not divide (? share) the
1 Nos. 30-38. Cf. Appendix E. 2 /£., Nos. 48, 9.

P.C. Z

338 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

honour of his succession," 1 which may be read both ways ; in praise of
undivided families, or in censure of the elder brother who refuses to share
when his brothers wish. Similarly, when brothers enter into a solemn
contract " to love each other," there is a reference to some authoritative
text like that which inspires the decision in an oft-quoted lawsuit, respect-
ing one of the many partitions of property between the descendants of
partners in the house of Ilanierba and Co.

Sininana and a son of Ubarsin were at variance and went to law, and
the judges, after awarding an equal share (two slaves) to each, proclaim,
according to the original version of Mr. George Smith : " Brother to
brother should be loving, brother from brother should not turn, should not
quarrel, over the whole a brother to a brother should be generous, the
whole he should not have." Other later renderings seem still to lack
finality, but it is clear that the text formulates the general principles
acted upon by the priesthood, in its character as a standing Court of
Arbitration, executing or revising deeds for the division of inheritances
between brothers.

There are suits for the restitution of family property wrongly alienated ;
and suits respecting divisions in which the parties may be commercial
partners rather than brothers.2 On the dissolution of a partnership the
property may also be divided with quasi-judicial solemnities; as is recorded
of Rammaniddina and Arad Martu, who, in the year that Zabu entered
into his father's house, went to Sippara, and in the gate of Samas they
give back principal and property. Arad Martu takes all that he possesses
with Rammaniddina and is gone away. " From mouth to money," i.e.
from the first verbal contract to the transfer of actual cash, the business is
concluded; they pledge themselves not to litigate or bring claims against
each other.3

Contracts to deliver goods, presumably paid for in advance, and receipts
for money or goods in discharge of similar contracts are fairly numerous ;
in one of these nine persons contribute jointly 3:}7 shekels 5SE of silver in
rings.4' Contracts for hired labour enable us to estimate the relation of
wages to rent, and prove the existence of a class of free labourers at this
early date. The highest money wages promised are 6 shekels a year, to
a man who is hired from his brother. One hires himself for six months
for 2 shekels, and another for one month for half a shekel paid down.
One is hired from his father for a year at the rate of if shekels ISSE, of
which half a shekel is to be paid in advance ; another father demands
2 shekels paid down ; a third is content with 600 measures of corn, a
quarter given in advance. In one case the contract is made with the mother
of the labourer, for 2 J shekels a year, the money to be paid to her ; in

1 Documents juridiques, p. 52.

2 The Akkadian has the same kind of ambiguity as modern languages, and the words
sometimes used are open to the interpretation " in relation to each other " in both, of the
senses of the phrase.

8 Meissner, No. 79. 4 /£., No. 85.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 339

another, two youths are engaged for the harvest, for 300 ka, the mother
of one and the father of the other contracting for them. In this case a
penalty for breach of contract is imposed. The group 1 only includes one
document in which the labourer is not said to be a relation of the person
contracting for the sale of his services ; in this case the wages agreed on
are one-third of a shekel monthly. Apparently 6 shekels, o.r six times the
rent of an average house, was a good wage, but hired servants were fed
and perhaps clothed in addition. Ten ka of corn is a daily wage, and,
though the data are insufficient to enable us to form an opinion as to the
standard of comfort in the labouring class, such as we gather from
Egyptian wall pictures and dietaries, we may note that the current pro-
portion between rent and wages is almost identical with that described in
modern China, a land of low prices and of high general average of
material comfort, where a workman may earn six shillings a week, and the
rent of a middle-class dwelling does not exceed one shilling weekly.2

§ 4. COMMERCIAL PHRASES IN RI-LINGUAL SYLLABARIES.

Besides the contract tablets, our only source of information respecting
the agricultural and commercial life of the men of Sumer and Akkad
consists in the bi-lingual syllabaries or commercial phrase books already
referred to. Like other dictionaries, they are rather disconnected but
not uninteresting or uninstructive reading. As a list of the "code
words " 3 in use by the merchants of our modern Babylon tells us what
messages the latter send most frequently to their correspondents, so these
syllabaries give a clue to the nature of the customary transactions, by
showing which words and phrases it was most important to a scribe to be
able to render in the ancient speech of the law courts and the ancestral
deeds.

The verbs conjugated in the syllabaries are " to sell " and " to buy,"
and the mere vocabulary is not without interest, as it shows the terms in
use continuously between the earliest and the latest deeds. The Sumerian
word for buying answers exactly to mancipium, and the same word is used
for selling ; a taking by the other party, as the Turks still say " take in
sale " for buy. The delectus also rings the changes on the word mercator;
the merchant may be great, small, weak, powerful, good, " exsistens " or
" deficiens " (?) solvent or otherwise. " He weighs his money and measures
his grain," * (a categorical statement which the modern speculative metrolo-
gist should perpend). " He pays according to his price," — " the perfect
price," or something else. The definition of the custom of the city, in the
matter of interest, has already been quoted.5 The same tablet gives the

1 Meissner, Nos. 51-61. 2 See/<w/, vol. ii. chap, xxvii.

3 " Unicode: The Telegraphic Phrase-book.'1'' Single words serve for instance for such
phrases as, "Do you confirm the agreement ? " " We (or they) do (or do not) confirm the
agreement ; " and so for orders, to be given or cancelled, acceptances renewed or with-
drawn, appointments made or altered, etc., etc.

4 Doc.jur., p. 12. W. A. /., PL 13, 44,5.

P- 334-

340 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

phrases "interest " or increase "for a year," " for a month," and the important
statement : " the interest of the city is one artaba (or one as) of grain in
all," upon which an argument, not now required, was based to show that
the rate of interest on corn was one in three. "Interest as agreed " is
contrasted with the city rate. To require the " interest together with the
grain " such an agreement seems to be needed.

We find also innumerable phrases on the subject of pledges, of which
the significance has been elucidated by M. Revillout. The expression,
for instance, which M. Oppert translated : " he made compensation with
money for a field" — or a slave, a house, a garden, etc. — does not refer to
compensation paid upon failure to redeem a pledge, but rather to the
equivalence established between the money and the goods when the use
of them was exchanged. The earliest deeds (temp. Hammurabi) do not
contain the express formula met with in those of the new Babylonian em-
pire : " There is no rent for the land and no interest for the money ; "
but this would be understood if such exchange was the normal primitive
custom, unless any other agreement was expressly stated. Contracts of
this period say : " When he brings the money, he can re-enter his house,"
or " sit in his field," " plant his garden," "take his (female) slave with him,"
or "have his (male) slave given back."1 And in all these cases we may
understand that until the money is brought, the lender of it enjoys all
these rights.

Slaves are not numerous, from one to four being the number generally
mentioned as owned at one time. The syllabaries have phrases about
slaves, who flee from their masters' house, who " return out of the refuge,"
— perhaps an allusion to the right of asylum as possessed by Egyptian,
Cappadocian, and Sybarite temples, — who " redeemed their servitude "
and " pay money for their redemption." 2 A slave, in the reign of Rim-sin,
sells for 10 shekels ; another is bought for 6 shekels, and one-sixth as sibiku ;
a female slave costs 4^ shekels beside the deposit ; and there is one con-
tract for the delivery ot light-coloured slaves from Guti, in one month's
time, for 204! ka of oil, the property of the god Samas, valued at one-
third mina and two-third shekels of silver, which makes the ka of oil worth
about one-tenth of a shekel. There is also a deed by which a man gives
a female slave, M., and her future children to a woman, S., adding "Z
(? a daughter of the slave already born) is also the daughter of S.,"3 as if
the object of the gift was to enable the woman to adopt the children of
the slave as " her children," as Rachel and Leah are the mothers of Dan
and Gad.

The tablet, which enumerates the different forms of holding, deals also
with the cultivation of the land. It is measured by the plough, and the
furlong ( = furrow long), the strip used as the agricultural unit by all later
cultivators of the soil, like most other elementary ideas, seems to be
derived from Babylonia. There are various phrases on the subject of

1 Meissner, Introduction, p. 9. 2 Ib., p. 14.

3 Ib.,l.c., No. 5.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 341

irrigation, which imply that contracts were modified when " he had irri-
gated the field with water." Similarly a reference to a " field of unfertil-
ity " is followed by the "lord of the field," evidently as the term likely to
present itself next in any contract or suit. " He brought water by double
and treble channels ; " " he arranged the irrigation ; " " he perforated the
vacant (i.e. sterile) soil," are all phrases the scribe might require to use or
understand in the ancient and the living language.1

The account of the seed required to sow given fields (20 hin to one
artaba) gives, according to M. Oppert's calculation, thirty-fold as an
average return.

The garden is to be marked out with stakes, and the distinction be-
tween garden and fields is so uniformly made that there can be no doubt
about the existence of customs corresponding to the Chinese, by which
the house stands in a garden, quite apart from the arable land tilled by
the householder. The reluctance of landowners to alienate, and the
ease with which they could reserve their right to resume possession and
occupancy, seems to have operated unfavourably upon the cultivator's
claim to fixity of tenure. He might be dismissed, apparently without
further notice, at the end of the month Marchesvan (the middle of Novem-
ber), that is when the harvest operations of the year were over. The
landlord then received his share of the produce in flour, the two measur-
ing it conjointly. Apparently land was only sold at this time of year,
or at least, it would be sold with possession in November, the purchaser
taking over the former owner's engagements down to that time. If it
changed hands before seed-time, the owner of the house could forbid the
sowing of the field.

The next section deals with buildings. Doors seem to have been re-
garded as " tenant's fixtures," that is, they were commonly removed by a
person giving up occupation ; but if the house was given to any one "to
be as his house " under the common antichretic bargain, it was supposed
to be fit for habitation, with doors, etc., complete. There fs something
about inserting beams in a wall, the significance of which is illustrated by
M. Revillout's account of an action, brought against some one who inserts
beams in his neighbour's wall, to support a building on his own land.
The neighbour's objection was sustained.2

If a house was unfit for human habitation, somebody was liable to a
fine of ten drachms, but it is not clear whether the builder or the person
mortgaging it is intended. Evidently, however, two of the commonest
things liable to happen to a house were : to be pledged for money, and to
have something wrong with the foundations. To this we may add a
third : its size might be diminished when an inheritance was divided
according to law. As in Egypt, such family partitions caused it to be
common for persons to own a fraction of a house, but the phrase used
here 3 might be taken to imply that the house was actually divided, the

1 Documents juridiques, p. 26 if. 2 Les Obligations* p. 427.

3 Documents juridiques, p. 34.

342 ANCIENT BABYLONIA,

heirs making a house apiece out of so many rooms. This arrangement
would explain the insistence on rights of way in and out of the house.

The different purposes or classes of signatures are enumerated at length,
and to give, to efface, or to renew such signatures are conjugated in various
ways. The Sumerian phrase for signature means literally a perforation by
hand, the finger being originally pressed upon the soft clay ; the nailmark
was afterwards substituted for the impression of the finger, among those
who were not of sufficient consequence to possess a seal. The Sumerian
version of all these commercial phrases is no doubt earlier than the few
private documents as yet known, between the reign of Samsi-iluna and the
later Babylonian monarchy.

A tablet from the Koyoundjik Library gives a list of dignities, functions,
and professions, like those met with in Egypt and China, some of the
most characteristic of which are " the minister of grain, and of precious
metals ; the chief of the documents, and the chief of the nobles ; the
scribe of births; the giver of names; the chief of the foundation stones, of
vineyards, of dykes, of waters, and of repairs ; the crier of the hours, the
inspector of markets, the writing master, the engraver," etc., etc. One
title, the Chief of the Six Hundred of the Country^ is so interesting in con-
nection with the sexagesimal system, the " sixty houses " of Entemena,2
the six hundred Annunaki, and the six Hundreds of Marseilles and Malabar,
that it is to be hoped some further light may be thrown on its history by
Assyriologists.

§ 5. BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN DEEDS (FOURTH TO NINTH DYNASTY).

The late George Smith found a tablet recording the sale of three slaves,
dated in the twelfth year of Simas-sihu, one of the earlier kings of the
Kassite Dynasty. And the monument already mentioned as belonging to
the reign of Marduk-apal-iddin, may be regarded as partly of a private
character, as it records the gift of particular lands by the king to an officer
in reward for his services.

A document of the reign of Nebuchadrezzar I. (circ. 1230 B.C.) is more
political than private ; it accords to Ritti-Marduk, the chief of the house
of Karzi-jabku, certain cities in the Kassite land of Namar, which had
formerly belonged to his house, but had been deprived of their indepen-
dence by enemies. The grant is made in gratitude for assistance in a
campaign against the king of Elam, rendered by Ritti-Marduk. It is of
historical interest because Nebuchadrezzar calls himself " Ravager of the
Kassites," whose dynasty had lately been expelled, as well as "Conqueror of
the west lands ; " while his other titles show that the revolution had been
effected in favour of the ancient stock, the descendants of the men of
Sumer and Akkad. The king is called the offshoot of Tintir, the archaic
name of Babylon, and in addition to more warlike titles, he is described
as " the sun of his land, the giver of happiness to his people, the protec-

1 Documents juridiqueS) p. 72. 2 Ante, p. 263.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 343

tor of boundaries, the confirmer of sons, the king of righteousness who
executes right judgment," 1 all of which allusions to the quality of the
king's domestic administration are characteristic of the native rulers, and
are met with again under the later Babylonian monarchy.

It is stipulated that subjects of the king of Babylon may reside in any
of the towns in question, but the towns are not to be required to pay any
taxes to the governor of the province where they are situated. The deed
is signed by twelve exalted personages, ending with the king himself, as
witnesses ; one of them is described as " overseer of the house of im-
plements," which Hommel proposes to interpret " treasure-house," but the
title may refer to some Babylonian counterpart to the " Board of works,"
which existed at a very early date in China and Egypt, and was a notable
feature in cities like Cyzicus. The inscription closes with vigorous impre
cations against any city or provincial governor who should disregard its
purport or substitute his own name for that of Karzi-jabku, or destroy, or
conceal the monument itself. Among the judgments invoked is one
which illustrates the attachment to house property : " the house that he
has built, may another take possession of it," is a curse only second to the
promise of slavery, death, and the extinction of posterity.

The new king of the Pasi Dynasty, added to the lists by the Pennsylvan-
ian Expedition, is known by an appeal addressed to him in his fourth year
by a priest, who complained of certain sacred lands having been secular-
ized by an officer. According to him one Gulkisar, king of the Sea
country, gave or measured off a piece of land to a goddess, who remained
in undisturbed possession for 696 years, till the reign of Nebuchadnezzar
(the First), and he prayed that it might be restored to her service.
Gulkisar is the name of the sixth king of the Second Dynasty, and the
interval between the two reigns, according to other sources, comes to 7 1 2
years. Belnadinaplu, the new king, any way succeeded Nebuchadnezzar,
and a discrepancy of sixteen years in seven centuries is not serious.2

Four contract or boundary stones are attributed to the reign of Marduk-
nadin-ahi, though two of them are singular in not giving the year or name
of any king. A stone found at Za'aleh, a few miles north-east of Babylon,
and dated in the first year of Marduk-nadin-ahi (circ. 1225 B.C.), relates to
some dispute respecting rights of water. The enjoyment of a house and
buildings is guaranteed to one person, and the use of certain waters of the
river and the canals to men, whose technical description has not been
interpreted. Eight persons in all sign as principals or witnesses.

Another document, dated in the tenth year of the same king's reign,
conveys a similar grant of land; but neither Hommel nor Oppert3 have
succeeded in making it quite clear by what title the king grants, to his
servant, land which seems to have formed a part of the family property of
one Ada. The land has been surveyed, and, as usual, its measurement is

1 Hommel, G.B.A., p. 449.

2 Z.A., Aug. 1893, p. 221.

8 Geschichte Bab. u. Ass. , p. 465; Documents juridiques^ p. 1 06.

344 ANCIENT BAB YLON1A.

given in terms of the quantity of grain required to sow it. It was situated
upon a river, not conclusively identified, but probably on the borders of
Assyria, in the debateable land between the two kingdoms. The possibility
of the grant being challenged by " brothers, sons, near relatives or allies
of the house of Ada " was contemplated in the deed ; they might object
that there was no donor, no one to sign the transfer, that its confiscation
had not been lawfully pronounced, and that, accordingly, the grantee's
title was defective. We may infer, therefore, that it had been confiscated
in the king's name, and granted by his minister to some loyal follower.
The livestock on the estate — thirty horses, three mares, and twenty-five
buffaloes — were not included in the forfeiture.

There are sixteen witnesses, the first of whom, called the son of Bazi,
may be the same as the founder of the Sixth Dynasty, and if not, must
have been a kinsman; one witness is called simply Babilai, the Babylon-
ian; several, judging from their father's names, were of Kassite extraction,
and one is also mentioned as holding property adjoining to that conveyed.
The document concludes with the usual imprecations, and is adorned with
the usual cabalistic emblems of the gods.

An undated deed of sale of about the same period refers to land, the
title to which is also a royal grant, though the deed records its purchase
by Nis-bel, son of Hankas, from one of the king's captains.1 It was paid
for in kind, and the value of each article was stated as equivalent to so
many pieces or weights of silver. A car, harness for six horses, two
Phoenician asses and two sets of harness, a mule (?), a cow in calf,
measures of two kinds of corn, two dogs and ten puppies, nine greyhounds
and three other dogs of different kinds, apparently for the chase, make up
the price of the land. The imprecations vary a little ; for instance, Ninip,
the god of harvest and boundaries, is adjured to sweep away the
boundary marks and trample down the crops of any one who disputes the
grant or damages the record of it. Bin, the supreme guardian of heaven
and earth, is called on to flood his fields, and Serat to strangle his first-born.

The latter imprecation recurs in the marriage contract known as
Michaux's stone,2 brought to France in 1800. This interesting document
was prepared by the husband's father, to commemorate the gifts made to
his son's wife by her father. It imprecates curses on any member of the
family or household of Killi (the bride's paternal grandfather), any guest
or stranger, or whomsoever else should lay waste the field or remove its
landmarks, who should give it to a god, or confiscate it for his lord, or
seize it for his own use, who should change its area, or " use new seeds
in measuring it" — the result of which would be to make its size come out
differently3 — or otherwise injuriously repudiate the agreement and transfer
the land to another.

In the contract of Ada, the erection of buildings on the land is forbidden

1 Documents juridiques, p. 117.

2 G.B.A., p. 475 ; Documents juridiques , p. 88.

3 Cf. Appendix E.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 345

as one of the acts by which ownership is asserted. The forbidden phrases
of repudiation, Non est donator ; Non est sigillator, are, of course, the
counterpart to the formulae, " he has not sold," " he has not given," used
when contracts are rescinded. It is more difficult to assign the value of
another stock phrase, which the contracting parties engage not to use :
" the head is not the head," or, " there is no eye ; " but the general pur-
port of all the documents is clear. Private ownership in land was so
sacred and unassailable an institution that a king's grant had to copy the
forms of a sale, and purely private deeds were put under the protection
of the gods with as much solemnity as monuments recording royal victories
and buildings.

M. Oppert gives as the earliest corresponding documents from Assyria
a fragmentary tablet of Ramman-nirari III.1 (810 B.C.) referring to a grant
to some religious establishment, and a contract respecting the sale of
slaves, which the name of the eponym enables us to fix in the same reign,
784 B.C. Four brothers, sons of a blacksmith, have inherited a female
slave, whom they agree to sell, subject to the right of redemption, to a
fifth party for the large sum of io|- silver mina. In 751 five men sell the
crop of a field of perfumes, estimated to produce nine ephahs of scent, for
half a mina.2 A few years later a person known as the Hittite sells a slave
for 20 drachms.

A man who has borrowed 16 drachms, the interest of which may run up
to 400 per cent., pledges a field of flowers ready for harvest as security for
the debt ; but the creditor, it is expressly stipulated, is not to have the crop,
which we may therefore conclude to be worth more than the usurious
maximum of interest contemplated.3 A similar deed, dated 711, promises
interest equalling three times the loan, which is shared between four per-
sons. One of the witnesses to this is called Superintendent of the weigh-
ing of metals. The next loan is for 10 silver minas of Carchemish, on the
security of stock, mostly sheep ; the rate of interest is stipulated, and it is
probable that the animals are only security for that ; they are not to be
delivered for three months, and the young are counted as a possible asset ;
but, as in many of these documents, doubts respecting a single word cast
uncertainty over the whole text.

In 717 three fields sown with sa-ki-bu are sold; they are described as
fields of i, i^-, and 3 homers ; as in the earlier deeds, their boundaries are
defined by the names of the adjoining landowners, one of whom is de-
scribed as mother of So-and-so.

A contract for the sale of three slaves, dated 708, is quite typical in
form : " The price has been fixed, the slaves have been bought and paid
for ; the bargain cannot be rescinded, and whoever demands to have it
annulled — whether the vendor or his brothers, or his brother's sons, or
other relative, or a person of influence ; whoever challenges the right of
the purchaser, and his sons or descendants, is to pay 10 minas of silver
and one of gold to the treasury of Istar of Arbela, and the money,
1 Documents juridiques, p. 145 if. 2 lb., p. 150. 3 /£., p. 156.

346 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

saving the tithe, shall return to the owner, he will give up his bargain ; he
will not have sold." The fine stipulated for is evidently intended to be
prohibitive ; it would seem, from expressions used here, that in cases when
the penalty is ten — or as is equally common, twenty — times the price, nine-
tenths of it is intended to go as a fine to the State or to the divinity
specified, and the tenth as compensation to the other party. In another
case, it is said, if the bargain is to be annulled, " the price and the tenth
shall return to the owner." l Possibly, if the double price was accepted as
fair compensation, no more had to be paid ; but if the other side did not
choose to rescind, the heavy penalty was their defence.

In all these deeds the parties are frequently described by their nation-
alities— the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Carchemisian, the Hittite.
Houses, as already mentioned, are sold with their beams and doors ; —
valuable and comparatively portable fixtures, which, owing perhaps to the
scarcity of wood, had to be purchased separately, like our shelves anu
cupboards. In Assyria, occupancy may have been less generally associated
with ownership than in Babylon and the southern provinces ; hence, in the
sale of an orchard, we find gardens and the men belonging to them in-
cluded in the transfer. Such a transfer would be to the advantage of the
tenant or metayer, if tenancy was the rule ; and it would tend to become
the rule, if family inheritances were generally sold, that the price might be
divided, instead of being shared as they stood. When we find two men
and a married woman joining to sell a house, the presumption is that they
inherited it jointly.

In the fourth year of Esarhaddon, a deed in Babylonian characters
promises interest up to double the principal on a debt of half a mina ; -
but it is possible that, as is distinctly specified in some cases, it was the
rule in all, for the interest only to begin to accrue if the debt was not paid
off at the time stipulated. The high rate of interest sometimes demanded
is connected with the short terms for which loans were made ; thus 8
drachms, lent for twenty days, if not repaid then, were to bear interest to
the amount of half a drachm, say 6 per cent, which would be monstrous
for so short a term, but very moderate as procuring an extension of credit
for three or six months.

A short deed (680 B.C.) is worth quoting as an illustration of the
flexibility of commercial transactions. M. has lent E. a silver mina ; E.
has a field of three homers, worth five-sixths of a mina, which he gives to
extinguish the debt, and the remaining 10 drachms are to be made up
out of the current crop which the two will share.3 A somewhat similar
transaction seems to have been effected about eight fields, producing a
crop of flowers every year in addition to the corn. The annual usufruct
is valued at one mina, and this is ceded for six years ; but the occupier
undertakes to give, instead of money, two spring and autumn crops, plus
coin enough to make up any deficit on the estimate of the corn crop, the
main profit evidently being expected from the flowers for perfumes.4

1 Documents juridiqueS) p. 242. 2 //;., p. 187. 3 lb., p. 185. 4 Ib., p. 199-

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS, 347

It was still quite worth a rich man's while to accept the use of land as an
equivalent for money loans, for Kakullanu, the tenant in the above trans-
action, appears in another deed as purchasing no fewer than twenty
separate plots of ground. In a third he sells, or, as we should say, ex-
changes a female slave for a man ; and he appears to have prospered
notwithstanding his distaste for cash transactions, as on this occasion he
has acquired a new title of dignity, and is finally described as administrator
of the property of the king's son, in another contract of the same type as
his first. In this case the land rented is valued at 12 drachms per
annum, in lieu of which he gives the owner three spring and three autumn
crops. He undertakes to make the field bear fruit as a field " according
to the custom," and acquiesces in an estate rule that a tenth of the corn
must not be nusahi.

There is yet another purchase of land by a Kukullanu recorded, but there
is no clue by which it can be assigned to the same person. Out of sixteen
witnesses to this deed, ten are described as men of one town, and five as
men of another.1

The old Sumerian custom of exchanging just so much land against so
much money had almost lost its character during the later years of the
Assyrian monarchy, but its influence is clearly traceable in the complicated
modifications of it which were in force; a money interest was calculated
upon the money lent, and the money value of the crops to be retained by
the debtor was also estimated, but it was becoming usual for the occupier
to be the debtor, and so it was he who paid in kind, out of the produce
of his land, a proportion equal to the stipulated interest. The increase of
such indebtedness among the cultivators would explain the lack of re-
cuperative power in the country, which was virtually annihilated in a single
generation.

In a deed of this kind, the owner undertakes to pay in money the value
of such grain as is due from the land for religious services. Probably
while the monarchy was thriving, the customary religious dues were paid
spontaneously, without need of express stipulation. One tablet of a rather
curious kind records that a certain woman has built a wall, and that
four men have charged one Nabonidus to keep it in repair. They have
dedicated it to the god Ninip as a perpetual gift, and appeal to the
piety of posterity to propitiate Ninip by not neglecting it.2 Presumably
the wall served as a boundary between the properties of the four signatories
and the sacred lands, and Nabonidus had been paid to execute the repairs
for one lifetime. It is rather characteristic of the kingdoms of Mesopo-
tamia to trust their foundations to the goodwill of posterity in general — a
posterity which would have just the same desire to stand well with the
gods as their predecessors, instead of labouring vainly to tie up for their
own spiritual benefit more than one life-interest in their own property.

One deed respecting the sale of a slave adds to the usiial penalties on
rescinding the contract a curious proviso that " the ancient interest " was
1 Documents juridiques, p. 246. 2 lb., p. 253.

348 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

to be paid to the god Ninip.1 Another, in which a woman buys a girl to
be her son's wife, would be more remarkable but for the fact that mother
and son bear Egyptian names, so that the transaction is not conclusive as
to Babylonian usage. The damsel concerned had come, through a marriage
and a mortgage, into the possession of three men — a father and two sons ;
she was sold cheap — for about three pounds— but the price was to be paid,
for some reason connected with the marriage and mortgage aforesaid, to
three other persons, the heirs of a creditor of the owners.

The above are all taken from M. Oppert's work, which contains a
sufficient number of specimens of each contract to make it clear that
these are representative. Many points are still obscure, but doubtful in-
terpretations do not deserve to be set aside with scorn if they are advanced,
so to speak, as a working hypothesis, which can be rejected any moment
that it fails to fit the facts. M. Oppert himself considers the material yet
available inadequate to warrant a general survey of the social relations
of the two empires ; and if this is the case with the Assyriologist who has
given most attention to this class of documents, it would be presumptuous
for any one else to do more than attempt to enumerate the various points
of interest which Sumerian law and custom will illustrate when we know
more about them.

§ 6. LATER BABYLONIAN DEEDS AND LAWSUITS.

The later Babylonian deeds which remain to be considered are really
nearer to the archaic type than those of Assyria, to which, on chrono-
logical grounds, precedence has been given. Nearly all the following
documents belong to some part of the sixth century B.C., that is, to the
reign of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors, ending with Belshazzar and
the reigns of the first Persian kings. In general they bear out M. Revil-
lout's contention that all Babylonian deeds were executed in good faith ; 2
there was the minimum of formality ; written deeds were the rule, but if,
for any reason, one had not been drawn up, the facts of the case were
allowed to be established in other ways, and a man who was proved to
have received either goods or money was required to pay for them, though
he had given no formal acknowledgment of the debt. This is so entirely
opposed to the pedantry of Roman law that it is quite possible that
the contrast between law and equity, emphasized in that between Roman
law and the law of nations, originated with this conspicuous feature of the
commercial law derived from Babylonia.

Commercial companies were called by the name of the leading partner.
Nebo-ahi-iddin, a banker of whom we shall hear a good deal, was the head
of such a firm, and when he withdrew from business, possibly on taking a
judgeship — for he was a great man and learned in the law — his son Itti-
marduk-baladu succeeded to the business, in which he was followed in due
course by his own son. Iddina-marduk, the son of a bankrupt, whose
1 Documents juridiques, p. 238. 2 Les Obligations, pp. 475, 496.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 349

anxiety to escape his father's fate led him to rake in the interest on frac-
tions of a shekel, was the head of another firm ; and we meet, though less
frequently, with companies called after Kudurru, Arduta, and Nebo-zirit-
apsi.

The same word is used for a commercial society or company, and a
political league and federation.1 Mention is made of different partners
being admitted by these companies at different times, and it seems pos-
sible that some of the joint transactions engaged in represented an associa-
tion only for one particular purpose or for a limited time ; — a sort of
association much favoured by the Berbers, the Chinese, and other branches
of the primitive stock in which the instinct of association was strongest
At the same time joint action among persons dealing only with their own
private property is common. The formula frequently used is, " They answer
for one another," 2 when two parties to a sale or purchase are concerned ;
but it is significant that this phrase is not used in the case of commercial
partnerships, when, the interests of the partners being identical, no addi-
tional security is given by their pledging themselves separately on each
other's behalf.

When a dividend was declared — as we should say — out of the profits of
the firm, the partners did not draw their respective shares in money, but
in the various kinds of property which each of them found convenient or
most easily realizable. Thus Nebo-ahi-iddin, having admitted Belsunu to
partnership, there is a tablet which, instead of any general statement of
the amount to be shared, declares in what shape they receive their respec-
tive dues, in slaves, or money, or credits upon the bank's customers.3 If
a man owed money to his banker, and one of the firm took his acknow-
ledgment as part of his dividend, the debt ceased to concern the firm,
and became a transaction between private individuals. The same kind of
partition took place between the sons of two former partners. Thus
when the partnership between the house of Kudurru and Rihitum Sons
was dissolved, each of the heirs took a house, and if one was of less value
than the other, a slave was thrown in. Then one takes fifteen mina, ten
shekels secured upon a house, and the other takes thirty slaves, forty-one
oxen, three camels, and so on, with a small money credit to balance the
account.4

A fresh agreement or deed of partnership was required if the son of a
partner entered into partnership on his own account, as appears from the
case of Nebo-ahi-iddin's son, who entered into such an agreement with his
father's old partner, Belsunu ; ultimately they shared profits and parted,
and in fact, the brotherhood — a word also used to denote partnership —
does not seem to have extended to all the operations of the bank, but only
to a separate speculation in date culture. Such transactions seem to have
come in the ordinary way of business to all large firms, and perhaps the
occupation of Nebo-ahi-iddin and his rival Iddina-marduk would be better

1 Les Obligations, etc., p. 374. 2 /<$., p. 478.

? /£,p. 389. «./&., p. 37-

350 ANCIENT BABYL0^7IA.

described as that of general merchants and money-lenders rather than
bankers. If they are to be called bankers, it must be with the proviso
that they themselves managed the affairs in which their clients' money was
engaged ; they superintended its use instead of merely selecting invest-
ments for it. Iddina-marduk took his brother-in-law into partnership, and
there were other partners, including subsequently a younger son of Nebo-
ahi-iddin.1 They dealt in cattle and grapes, as well as in houses and lands,
and perhaps acted as builders themselves, — at least, in the seventh year
of Nabonidus, Iddina had contracted for a supply of 4,000 bricks.

The Babylonians distinguished two parts in the ordinary transactions of
the market, the contract and the sale, the promise to pay and the actual
payment. Trade was facilitated because the promises circulated as cash,
just as in the modern system of credit. If the money was paid down at
once, the receipt for it was combined with the contract,2 and there was no
vested interest of lawyers to prevent any number of transactions that were
actually combined, being recorded on the same brick. If cash is not paid
for the goods, the contract often stipulates when they shall be paid for.
But sometimes the price is paid at the time of the contract, and it is the
goods that remain owing. Contracts, for instance, for the delivery of
grain, usually stipulated for its receipt in May (i.e. after the harvest), or if
the locality was distant, a month later ; dates were due in autumn. In
one contract of the time of Darius, it was stipulated that if a woman had
not delivered the corn and dates contracted for at the time agreed on, she
must give money instead,3 according to the prices of the Babylon market,
which of course would be highly disadvantageous to a grower.

In general the interval between the contract and the payment represents
the term of grace allowed for payment, or, as we should say, the credit
given. Sometimes there was a debt on both sides, and the purchaser giving
an order for his firm, pledged himself for the payment ; or in the opposite
case, as of a purchase of grapes by Nebo-ahi-iddin, seven vine-growers
pledged themselves conjointly, to deliver them in due season. Such
guarantees were generally given by persons who were really in a position
to make good the deficiency, and it happens sometimes that one person is
security for the delivery of goods and another for that of money. If money
was paid in advance for work, the money was held to be a debt till the
work was finished.4 Though all kinds of credit were interchangeable,
particular liabilities were calculated in terms of the article originally owing,
corn or whatever else it might be ; so that if slaves or money were accepted
instead, they were each described as worth so much corn.

The fact that wealthy men were engaged quite as often in selling goods
as in lending money must have certainly contributed to the evenhandedness
which seems to have characterized the business dealings of Babylonia.
There is all the difference in the world between the position, say, of a
date-grower, who contracts, for so much money down, to deliver so much

1 Les Obligations, p. 436. 2 76., p. 439.

3 Ib., p. 464. 4 //>., p. 449.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 351

fruit next autumn, and the poverty-stricken cultivator, who borrows, in the
winter, money which he hopes to be able barely to repay out of his next
harvest returns. The case would be more nearly parallel to that of a
cotton planter, who receives telegrams from Liverpool bidding for the
delivery of so many bales, at a price fixed by international competition,
before the cotton itself is picked. One is tempted to conjecture that the
reason agriculture, commerce, and manufactures throve in Mesopotamia
for so many thousand years, is that by rare wisdom, or still rarer luck, a
due proportion was maintained between the development of all three,
and that there was no speculative overproduction, through depreciated
labour.

The interchangeableness of all assets, which has been mentioned already,
may be illustrated by a few examples. A debtor might leave his money
in the hands of his surety, to be paid over when due, and the surety's
receipt freed him from further liability. Anybody who pays a debt, with-
out any reference to the debtor, takes the place of the original creditor,
and in the same way the creditor may desire to have the money due to
him paid to another person, and a deed to that effect is drawn up.

A debt of corn was paid partly by surrender of a slave, partly by corn
delivered to a creditor of the lender, and a bill is given for the balance.1
A banker pays fifty-two shekels to a woman who holds a mortgage on a
slave, and so acquires the slave. Again, two persons have accounts to
settle, but one of them being absent, a friend takes his place for the occa-
sion. This would not prevent the absentee from getting redress subse-
quently, if an unfair advantage had been taken of him.2 The doctrine of
agency might be applied as widely as possible, provided the application
was beneficial. But a man was not bound to ratify acts done in his name
unless he pleased. A brother of Itti-marduk-baladu sold a slave of his; he
objected, and the bargain was cancelled, the slave and the price being
returned.

Again, N. claimed to be repaid by S. the sum of twenty-three silver
mina, which, on a verbal order of S., he had paid to a creditor of his. It
was proved that the money was due and that he had paid it, and S. was
therefore judicially required to refund, though he was allowed time to do
so.3 If the fact of a payment was contested, the evidence of witnesses
was conclusive. Debts were often paid by instalments, and it is by com-
parison, a matter of course, that bankers, holding their clients' securities,
should advance money to pay their debts, trusting to realize their assets at
leisure. In the case of a mother and son, having money owing to them
jointly, the debt was extinguished by giving up a bill on one of them (the
mother), whereby M. Revillout supposes the son would become his mother's
creditor, to the extent of his interest. But supposing them to have a joint
interest in the family property, the son would be liable for the debt if not
cancelled, and therefore benefits sufficiently by his mother's release. In

1 Les Obligations, p. 380. 2 /£., p. 379-

a jb., p. 474-

352 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

something the same way, money due by husband and wife to a man is paid
to his wife.

From a rather obscure text given by M. Oppert,1 it would appear that
the Chinese maxim, " Father's debt son pays," held good in Babylonia.
In the fifteenth year of Nabonidus, B. claims "by the law of Bel," from
K.'s son R. and a certain D., the payment of a debt of K.'s. D. and K.
were relatives, and part of their household furniture (apparently D.'s share
of K.'s inheritance) was security for the three mina adjudged to be due.

A few miscellaneous deeds help to complete the picture of an essentially
homely, domestic civilization. In 594 B.C. one N. received a tablet from
a brother and sister, acknowledging their debt of one mina due to him as
caretaker of their gates, crops, and town house.

Nebo-ahi-iddin successfully contested the claim to a right of way through
a passage to his avenue.2 A propos of this M. Revillout claims for the
Babylonians the invention of the law of easements, and divers other
abstract rights slowly admitted by Roman law. Descriptions of houses
frequently mention the " access and exit," and a habit of dividing tene-
ments between the members of a family would cause such accessories to
be an essential element in the value of the property.

In the fourth year of Nabonidus, the same great personage sells an ass
for one mina. He buys a garden and a date grove in Babylon, by " the
gate of the river of Borsippa," which is sold by M. the son of N. and his
wife Q., assisted by N.'s mother and Q.'s father. In one of his many
tablets a price is described after the Egyptian fashion, " three shekels, the
third is one," 3 whence it appears that the other party to the bargain must
have been used to the Egyptian trade. He also buys ancient vases and
sells them for dates, to be delivered at a specified term. We find also
special deeds to explain whether a slave belongs to the firm or to one of
its members individually.

Towards the close of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebo-ahi-iddin had
great transactions with the future king, Neriglissar, who succeeded Evil-
Merodach. He bought corn from him, and continued to act for him till
his succession. His transactions at this time were so large that Revillout
conjectures that the various rasutanu employed were men of straw, meant
to conceal Neriglissar's operations. The last purchase on his account was
completed in the year of his accession, and as the king could not be
mentioned by name in such a matter, the land is described as " sold to
the palace," a euphemism exactly answering to that from which the
Pharaohs took their title.

After the eighth year of Nabonidus, Nebo-ahi-iddin seems to have handed
his business concerns over to his son Itti-marduk-baladu, and after the tenth
year his name is not met with again. He had other sons, as well as
brothers, not in the firm, and in the following generation also only one
of the banker's sons continued in the business.

1 Documents juridiques, p. 264. a Ib., p. 391.

3 /£., p. 394.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 353

The capture of Babylon by Darius does not interrupt the series of
deeds. In the third year of his reign, Marduk-nazir-aplu, the third repre-
sentative of the firm, pledged a house in the old antichretic style for one
mina and five-sixths. A somewhat obscure phrase seems to bind the
tenant to execute all repairs, and any way the same person leases a house,
the rent of which is to be paid half-yearly; the tenant is bound to complete
the building, and one is tempted to exclaim, Truly Babylon is fallen !
— fallen from her high estate as a mirror of equity to the nations, for it is
agreed that the structures executed by the tenant shall become the property
of the landlord on the expiry of the lease. Babylon did not vanish all at
once off the face of the earth ; her old laws died hard, and contracts of the
Persian period refer to them as still in force ; even under the Seleucidae
they were not extinct. But the tendency of the age was against them ; and
when a few more centuries had elapsed, Babylon the Great had become,
according to the Babylonian Talmud, a very bye-word for poverty.1

The banking grandson alone is concerned with the bank's debts, and
we find him called on to pay nineteen mina, the balance of a debt of his
father to the father of a creditor. He pays part down and gives a bill at
some months date for the balance ; meanwhile, he acts with his brothers
in matters regarding the family property, and takes part, e.g. in proceed-
ings to restrain a neighbour from attaching beams to the wall of their
house. It is usual, especially in transactions respecting family property,
for several of those interested to sign as witnesses, and far from uncommon
for the deed to be drawn up by some relative of one of the principals.

The house of Kudurru lends money to the brother of one of the partners,
and a third brother draws up the acknowledgment. Probably out of
fraternal affection, the interest in this case is only charged at the reduced
rate of eight per soss. Itti-marduk-baladu, however, had a credit on his
father's brother of three and a half mina at the usual rate of twelve per
soss, the younger generation perhaps not being required to favour their
seniors in such matters. In the case of a rather complicated agreement
to pay back a loan (not bearing interest) by specified instalments at speci-
fied dates, the father of the borrower guaranteed the debt ; and, being a
scribe, wrote the tablet which another son witnessed. Bankers, in addition
to their other multifarious undertakings, used to warehouse their clients'
valuables, as Chinese pawnbrokers do.

Occasional expressions, especially in the later deeds, let us see how

1 " Ten measures of wisdom came into the world ; the land of Israel received nine, and
the rest of the world one. Ten measures of poverty came into the world ; the land of
Babylon received nine, and the rest of the world one " — are the first and fourth lines in an
enumeration which gives the pre-eminence in beauty to Jerusalem, in riches to the
Romans, in pride to Elam, in strength to Persia, in vermin to Media, in magic to Egypt,
in the plagues of uncleanness to swine, in luxury to Arabia, in impudence to Messene,
in talkativeness to women, in blackness to the children of Gush, and in sleepiness to
servants. The pride of Elam is, apparently, one of the most enduring of national traits.
Mrs. Bishop writes : "The Baktiaris have an enormous conceit of themselves and their
country," and are fond of tales in which one Baktiari kills twenty Persians. (Journeys in
Persia and fairdistan, i. p. 357.)

P-C. A A

354 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

much law and custom there was in force of which we know nothing, because
its notoriety is taken for granted in all legal documents. In the reign of
Darius (512 B.C.), a woman is stated to owe ten artaba of corn, " the amount
of the debt in the tenth year ; " she is to give her creditor one artaba, plus
one ephah, "according to the custom of her people." The same phrase
about the tenth year occurs in another deed ; Bel-ballitsu lets a house to
his son Nur, who is to have it as his own ; but after the tenth year he is to
pay at the rate of so much grain a day, at specified terms, or failing that,
two talents of wrought lead. One is tempted to ask, was ten years the
normal term for antichretic hirings, as distinct from the older arrangement
by which the use of land and money were exchanged either for a definite
term or sine die, and was the artaba and ephah due from the woman, at the
end of ten years, " according to the custom of her people," in the nature of
a fine for renewal ?

The reason for thinking that this may be so, is that in Malabar,1 where,
as will be seen, a number of usages linger akin to the most archaic customs
of Egypt and Babylonia, all leases are at the present moment executed
more or less in the form of antichretic mortgages, with fines for renewals, at
intervals now generally fixed at twelve years. It may certainly be hoped,
if this conjecture is well founded, that among the many tablets, as yet un-
translated, some will contain evidence enough for its confirmation.

In general, town houses are described by measurement of their area,
calculated with surprising exactitude from the length of the different sides,
while country properties, as already mentioned, are estimated by the
amount of seed-corn they require. This mode of measurement is still in
use in Portugal, and it was one of the grievances after the English conquest
of Ireland, that area instead of productiveness was made the standard of
measurement. To take account of both together would evidently be too
difficult, and the other more equitable method would not commend itself,
except to communities in which every child knew what was the normal
proportion between seed and return. In Babylonia the custom was carried
so far that the size of a date grove, for instance, would be given in measures
of corn.

M. Revillout considers that the native antichretic mortgage, without
rent for the house and without interest for the money, was held to be the
most dignified ; there was certainly no such association of impecuniosity
about it as about modern mortgages. Itti-marduk-baladu's son pledged a
house in this way,2 and the number of transactions of the kind recorded
shows that the Babylonians cannot have had any aversion to a change of
domicile. The same person, a good many years later, in the reign of Cam-
byses, exchanged a field for a town house, belonging to a man and wife ; the
house was not in Babylon, but still the fact that there was no cash balance
over confirms the impression we have already received, that the country
could hold its own against the town. This was the more possible because

1 Book III. ch. x.

" Les Obligations, p. 516.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 355

all the fields, where towns were set two or three miles apart, must have had
the value of market gardens or accommodation land.

A few deeds diverge slightly from the common type. In one case three
mina are secured upon a house, of which only one bears interest, the other
being set against the use of the house. This last deed was signed by a
slave.1 There seems indeed to have been no limit to the civil capacity of
slaves. A slave of Neriglissar, after the accession of Nabonidus, pledged
a house, or rather, " his part of it," by antichresis. Slaves are frequently
met with, acting in their own private interest, conjointly with freemen.
The elastic law of agency extended to them ; a slave belonging to the son
of a creditor, receives money on his account.

The slave and secretary of Belshazzar, the king's son, sells a slave of
his own to a sanctuary in the town of Ur ; the son and the wife of
slaves, described as such, witness the deed.2 Another slave who was
mortgaged with his whole family (in the same way that houses were),
writes like a son to his master; in a deed where he and his wife are
mentioned, his brother is called "their brother," exactly as, in the case
of free marriages, the parents of both spouses alike are called "their"
father or mother. Iddinamarduk seems to have been in the habit, whenever
he wanted money, of pledging a certain trusted slave, who all the time
continued to act financially for him, if not literally to work for him, and
whom he redeemed when needing further assistance. Yet the terms used
in executing the mortgage of slaves are identical with those used for land
or houses, with the addition " there is no term of hiring for the slave and
no interest on the money."

Sometimes it is specified in a deed that payment of what is owing is to
be made by or to a slave of one of the parties. It is a question, indeed,
whether we ought to use the word " slave " to describe the purchased
famuli of Egypt or Babylonia. Their family life and relationships were
respected, and so was the private property they might succeed in acquir-
ing ; it is true they were property in the eyes of their employers, but then,
what is there which, in a thoroughly commercial community, does not
acquire a money value ?

If a mine or a factory changes hands, we do not now count the opera-
tives among the property bought and sold,3 yet as a matter of fact a
business in full swing, with a complete staff of managers and workmen, is
worth more than bare walls and engines. This staff, as well as the prospect
of orders, is transferred with the " good-will," which is a marketable property.
The Babylonian servant received in lieu of wages, maintenance for him-
self and family and considerable liberty in the disposal of his leisure ; but
as he was not utilized industrially or commercially as a money-making
machine, it might be argued that the value which changed hands on the
so-called sale was the transfer of a servant's " good- will." Asylums existed

1 Les Obligations, p. 369. 2 /£., p. 395.

3 In Germany miners were so counted long after the Middle Ages, and supposed to
change hands with the mine where they worked like serfs adscripti gleba.

356 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

for the reception of superannuated slaves : and Nebo-ahi-iddin, in virtue of
some credit of his on the establishment for that purpose, is said to have
caused a slave "to dwell with the old men."1

In some family arrangements the form of a contract was occasionally
used, evidently in order to convey a legal title to the property ceded.
Thus a mother lets a house on mortgage to her son for four years, but she
only took a nominal fraction of the money at which the house was valued.
She had herself received the house in antichresis, and she could only in this
way transfer her rights in it to her son. The clause by which antichretic
tenants are required to do all the repairs "great and small," is probably a
survival from the time when such arrangements lasted for a lifetime or
more, so that the tenant was virtual owner, and might reasonably be ex-
pected, as he is in China, to do all the reparations necessitated by time
and use.

The antichretic mortgage gave no occasion for any process answering to
foreclosure, but when an article was not given up, but only pledged as
security for a debt, in the manner of a bill of sale, the creditor in the last
resort might claim his security. Thus, in the reign of Nabonidus, a
creditor who could obtain no other satisfaction, seized his debtor's woods,
as they stood, but by doing so, he assumed all liabilities connected with
the property, and after settling his own bill, divided the residue among
other creditors in proportion to their claims.2

M. Revillout is inclined to believe that the substitution of a general
mortgage on all the debtor's property, " all their goods of town and
country," for some definite equivalent to the debt, is the result of Egyptian
influence. Such a mortgage was used in Egypt, where there was much less
commercial genius and ingenuity than in Mesopotamia, and the first
example of it in the latter country is an act found at Warka and dated in
the reign of Assurbanipal, when certainly Egyptian influence had most oppor-
tunity of making itself felt. An incidental sign of its strength is furnished
by the signature to a deed in which an Egyptian witness calls himself "the
king's kinsman," either translating the native title suten re% or suppos-
ing that such a title must imply a corresponding rank in both countries.

The Babylonian tribunals seem never to have regarded indebtedness as
a criminal offence. If a creditor, who had failed to obtain his dues, ap-
pealed to them, provided the claim was not contested, they were content
to make an order for repayment on easy terms. If, however, they were not
satisfied of the defendant's good faith, as in China, they added a penalty
to the loss of the cause. Thus in a suit about a slave, the woman who was
proved by witnesses, including a son of her own, to have made a wrong-
ful claim, was condemned to pay a sum of money as damages, equivalent
to the value of the slave in question.3

Another lawsuit, according to M. Oppert's version of a text 4 (the in-
terpretation of which has been disputed by Assyriologists with their usual

1 Les Obligations, p. 372. 2 y#<} p ^Q2^

8 Jb.t p. 387. 4 Records, N.S., i. p. 154.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 357

vivacity), dealt with the claims of a certain slave to be of free or noble
birth. We find in a Cretan code containing ancient elements1 various
provisions for the case of a freeman being wrongfully claimed as a slave,
and this seems to imply that similar inalienable hereditary rights to free-
dom or citizenship were recognised in Babylonia. M. Oppert's account of
the matter is that one Barachiel, a Jew, was bought in the thirty-fifth year of
Nebuchadnezzar (570 B.C.) by a woman named Gaga, from A. son of N.,
for one-third of a mina and eight shekels. He is described as " a slave of
ransom," possibly one entitled to redeem himself if he could raise the money,
or perhaps only one transferred by mortgage, not sale, and therefore liable
to be redeemed by his original owner. The interpretation of this phrase
does not affect the case. He remained in the hands of Gaga for twenty-
one years, and was then pledged as the dowry of Gaga's daughter, Nubta ;
afterwards Nubta exchanged him for a house and slaves belonging to her
husband and son : — if the bargain was unequal, it was their way of mak-
ing her a present of the difference in value.

After the death of Gaga and Nubta, he was sold to our old friend
Itti-marduk-baladu for silver. Thereupon, apparently he brought an action,
affirming that he was the son of " an ancestor," of the family of Bel-
rimmani, — a fils de famille in fact, and alleged, by way of proof, that he
had officiated at the marriage of Q. the daughter of A. (who was said to
have sold him to Gaga), and S. the son of N. her husband. The phrase
used is "joining the hands," and it is supposed that the exercise of such a
function would imply free or noble birth. But when the case was brought
into court, and all the evidence in support of the servile status, submitted
to by Barachiel for so many years, had been heard, he himself felt the
cause was lost, and instead of perjuring himself, "he retracted his former
statement" and said he had only pretended to be a freeman because he
had twice run away from his master's house and " was afraid." The case
was tried " in the presence of the high priest, the nobles and the judges of
Nabonidus, king of Babylon," who " restored Barachiel to his condition as
slave of ransom." No penalty was inflicted, and perhaps it is as fair to
argue that Barachiel's first employers must have been kind, to make him so
loath to leave them, as that he must have been ill-treated by Itti-marduk,
or he would not have run away from him.

An emancipated slave received from his master a " letter of citizenship,"
that is a document giving him the status of a man with " ancestors." And
it is noticeable that the guarantees, demanded from the vendor on the sale
of a slave, included the assurance that he was not a citizen. It was also
provided that if he returned to his former master he was to be sent back, so
that clearly Babylonian slaves had a way of their own of protesting against
unwelcome transfers, though it was not, as in Egypt, the rule for their con-
sent to be obtained.

If a slave was injured by ill-treatment, the person guilty of it had to give
him a daily allowance of corn until his recovery. At least this seems to be

1 Post, p. 476.

358 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

the meaning of an " Employers' Liability " clause in the law tablet which
gives the ancient formula for the renunciation of family ties. " If an over-
seer let a slave flee, if he dies or becomes infirm in consequence of ill-
treatment, he shall pay him half a hin of com per diem."1 This has some-
times been taken as implying that the owner was to be compensated for
injury to his chattel, but it is probably connected with the general rule
that wounded persons should be treated and cured at the expense of the
person who caused the injury, and the compensation to the owner would
consist only in his being relieved from the cost of his slave's maintenance
so long as the latter was disabled from work.

Three deeds have been translated, referring to the apprenticeship of
slaves, by their masters, to tradesmen with a view to their learning the
craft in question. In one case2 the slave is apprenticed for five years to
learn the trade of an isparatu • the woman who apprentices him contracts
to find one ka of food and necessaries daily for his maintenance. If the
trade is not duly taught, the master is apparently to give the equivalent of
one and a half times the slave's maintenance; and either party challenging
the agreement is to pay a fine of two-thirds of a silver mina.

In the other two contracts3 the trade of a mutu is to be taught, and for
this an apprenticeship of three months is expected to suffice. The teacher
is to have a garment as a present if he succeeds with his pupil, and is to give
three ka of grain for every day if he fails. Evidently the work is unskilled,
and the slave's labour is worth the cost of his maintenance from the first.
Both these deeds come from Babylon, and the second is dated in the 26th
year of Darius.

The third contract of the kind comes from Sippara; the tradesman is
not paid for the slave's keep while learning, and he is to be taught in the
necessary time, but his services are to be retained for three months after
he has learnt the work. It is expressly stated, " He will live upon the pro-
ducts of his own work;" but if he is not taught the trade properly, six ka of
wheat is to be paid daily as his hire. The fine for breach of contract is
half a mina. The names of several of the parties to these deeds have been
met with elsewhere, notably the ladies Nubta and Tabutum, the former of
whom apprentices a slave belonging to Itti-marduk-baladu.

The sentences pronounced in Babylonian law courts, so far as they have
reached us, possess one remarkable common quality : they are perfectly in-
telligible. There is no doubt as to their bearing, or as to the relation
between them and the evidence. In the cause cettbre of Bunanitum,4
justice was done at once to the widow, her deceased husband's creditor and
his brother. If the parties themselves do not state the issue clearly, the
judges go straight to the root of the matter with a single question. Thus
a man had deposited with his banker, Nebo-ahi-iddin, a sealed sum of money,
representing part of the price of a house which he had bought, probably
by way of mortgage. Four years afterwards he died, and Bel-rimaniri, the

1 Doc.jur., p. 61. 2 Mr. Pinches, Bab. and Or. Rec., vol. i. (1886-7), p. 81.

3 /<$., and M. Revillout, vol. ii. (1888), p. 119. 4 Pott, p. 376.

COMMERCIAL LAW AND CONTRACT TABLETS. 359

vendor, applied to the banker for the balance of payment. Meanwhile the
banker had also died, and Itti-marduk-baladu, who reigned in his stead,
refused the application. " So they went into the presence of the nobles
and the judges. The latter said (to an independent witness), ' Is there a
mortgage which swallows it up upon this deposit ? ' He said : ' I know of
none either on the whole or on any part of it.' The deposit in its sealing,
Itti-marduk-baladu restored and gave it to Bel-rimaniri in the presence of
the officers and the judges."1

All legal documents were so concise that dilatory proceedings were im-
possible : a series of pilces justificatives were put in, and evidence on oath
was only called for to supplement any missing Imk in the narrative thus
applied. The proceedings, in fact, were so clear and simple that by the
time the case had been heard, it was hardly necessary to pronounce
judgment, as both parties knew as well as the judges themselves what the
decision would be, and so, whether losing or winning, were prepared to
acquiesce in the verdict.

1 Les Obligations, p. 414.

CHAPTER VI.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW.
§ i. AKKADIAN LAW TABLET.

THE contract tablets illustrate the working of the family law of Babylonia
to some extent, but less than might perhaps have been anticipated. This
is owing to the tendency seen in every deeply rooted system of customary
law, to take for granted and leave unexplained just its most familiar and
fundamental principles. The mass of usage which prevailed in Mesopo-
tamia after the time of the first Sargon — whenever that may have been —
was a cross between pure Sumerian gynoecocracy, which bore doubtless
considerable resemblance to Egyptian custom, and the patriarchal theory
of the family characteristic of the Semitic stock. It is almost unexampled
that two such opposite types of usage should have blended, and the ex-
planation is, possibly, that the later and more intolerant form was held by
tribes, so obviously inferior in material civilization and intellectual culture,
that they had actually more wish to borrow than to dictate. By the time
that they had borrowed all that they found most attractive in Sumerian
civilization, they and their teachers had both become essentially bi-lingual,
and there was no antagonism between the races to induce scholars or
patriots to trace the different ideas that existed harmoniously together, to
their divers origins.

It is probably owing to Semitic influence that at the time of Hammurabi
and ever afterwards, men and women are always described as son or
daughter of So-and-so, meaning their father ; but the father of a woman is
always named under circumstances where the father of a man would be ;
and the adoption, by each of the married pair, of the other's parents, stands
on the same footing ;* the husband's parents, and the wife's parents after
the marriage, are equally "their parents " for the future. The peculiarity
has no special social or economical consequences, but it is worth noting,
because the list of sociological experiments tried by the three primitive
civilized nations is thus completed. The Egyptians were supposed to give
supremacy in marriage to the wife ; the Chinese elected to give it to the
husband ; while the Babylonians, who did not lag behind either of the
others in wisdom and well-being, seem to have solved the difficult problem
of founding the family upon a balance of powers.

There are two Sumerian words for the social aspects of the matrimonial
relation which are simply astounding. The idealization of marriage is

1 In one deed a man is described as " father-in-law of So-and-so." (La condition
jurid. de lafemme, Introduction, xxxi.)

360

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 361

not an achievement of the latter days of the modern Aryan. Five or six thou-
sand years ago, the men, from whom all the world has borrowed the primary
divisions of time and space, spoke of the union of husband and wife as
11 the undivided half" x or " the divided house." The father is " one who
is looked up to ; " the ideogram for mother suggests the elements " god "
and "house ; " she is " the enlarger of the family." A son is " little one ; "
a grandfather is "the white-haired one."

Fragments of the old Sumerian family law survive ; but the existence of
slight incorrectnesses of rendering common to the oldest bi-lingual con-
tracts and the bi-lingual law tablets, copied in the seventh century B.C.
from older originals,2 makes it probable that we have no relics of those
laws dating from the age of their unmixed supremacy, before the advent of
the Semites, for whose benefit they were translated. It is quite credible
that the bulk of the bi-lingual tablets preserved by Assurbanipal were com-
posed 2,000 years, more or less, before the beginning of our era. But if so,
the untranslated originals must have been centuries or millenniums older
still ; and we cannot be absolutely certain of their being untouched by the
compromises, of which the bi-linguals themselves were at once a sign and
an instrument. A geographical bi-lingual, in which phrases about "a fort,"
a " great fort," are followed by " the great fort of Nipur," " of Babylon,"
" of Sippara," may be taken as pointing to the part of Mesopotamia (i.e.
Akkad), in which the demand for such aids against the confusion of tongues
would be first and most felt.

The passage referring to the ancient laws of the family, upon which
Assyriologists have mainly concentrated their attention, does not stand by
itself ; it occurs in the middle of a column which begins with the law of
divorce. It differs, however, from many passages in these bi-linguals, in
containing a series of complete sentences, as distinct from words and
clauses, which the student is intended to put together, according to the
particular contract required. It differs also from the other class of ambigu-
ous texts, like the so-called Story of a Foundling, as to which it is hard to
judge whether the text is meant to be consecutive or not — to narrate facts
or explain the formulae used in the narration of facts, which were expected
to require putting on record so often that the scribe had to become familiar
with them.

There are six successive clauses, each headed "A law," or "a decision,"
stating what consequences befal when a son says to a father, when a son
says to a mother, and when a father or mother say to a son, respectively,
"Thou (art) not my father," "not my mother," "not my son;" and when
a wife says to a husband, or a husband to a wife, " Thou (art) not my
husband," or " not my wife."

It must be remembered that the texts are of the tersest, baldest sort, in
two practically unknown tongues, where three roots, put together in any
order, even when their several values are ascertained, may be turned into
sentences of quite different, not to say opposite significance.

1 Oppert, Doc.jur., p. 41. 2 Hommel, G.B.A., p. 386.

362 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

All translators agree as to the first three lines of the original six, occu-
pied by the first decision : " When a son to his father, My father not thou,
says." As to the remainder, there is a large variety of renderings. M.
Oppert, in 1877, translated it : "(and confirms it) with the impression of
the nail, he gives him a pledge and pays him money."1 M. Bertin, in 1884,
read it :2 "The nails he shall cut him ; in servitude he shall put him, and
for money he shall sell him." Hommel in 1887 gives it:3 "He shaves
him, puts him in bonds, and for silver gives him." Haupt's translation,
made in 1879, 4 is the most independent rival of Oppert's, and in this clause
he proposes to read : " So scheert er es, zur Feldarbeit bestimmt er es und
fur Silber giebt es hin ; " and the latest version by Meissner reads : " Er
wird ihm ein Mai machen und ihn fur Geld verkaufen (he brands him, and
sells him for money)."

It is obvious that a word with a root meaning " to cut " may acquire a
great many derivative meanings and associations to which the bare etymo-
logy supplies no clue. The idea of cutting is apparently taken mainly from
the Assyrian version, and the reference to nails from the Akkadian ; and
M. Oppert's version is suggested by the use of nail-marks in lieu of seals.
But it is doubtful whether the nail, as distinct from the finger-mark, was
in use as early as when these bi-linguals were first prepared. For the re-
maining clauses it will be sufficient to compare M. Oppert's literal Latin
version with the modification of Haupt's rendering adopted by Hommel.

If the son renounces his mother : Urbem convocet, et ex domo exire jubeant,
or " they make a eunuch of him ; they hunt him out of the town, and drive
him out of the house." If a father renounces his son : " In domo et in con-
structione indudatur ; " or " They drive him out of house and yard." If a
mother renounces her son : " In domo et in carcere includatur" or " They
drive him out of her house."

Si mulier marito suo (qui] injurias facit, imaritus meus non til dicitj in flu-
mine immergant eum" The absence of genders causes the Akkadian version
of this to run : " If to a spouse, by a spouse, evil is done, and not my
spouse, he-or-she says, they take and throw him-or-her into the river."
The Assyrian version makes the injured spouse say, " Thou art not my
man ;" otherwise we should be entirely in the dark as to the personality of
the speaker.5 The notion that a man should be drowned, or even ducked,
for ill-using his wife, and making her desire a divorce, was so surprising,
that even the conscientious Haupt was for once seduced by an apparently
obvious meaning, and got his pronouns mixed, reading, u When a wife is
unfaithful to her husband, they shall throw her into the water." However,
as a mere matter of grammar, Hommel argues that Oppert's version is the
correct one. Finally, if a husband renounces his wife : " Dimidiam minam
argenti solvat" "He pays her half a mina of silver."

1 Doc.jur., p. 56. 2 T.S.B.A., viii. 3, p. 255.

3 Gesch., p. 382. 4 Die Sitnurischen Familiengesetze, p. 22.

5 The common pronoun, which means both " he " and "she," is commonly translated
"he," and so, of course, promotes the confusion.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 363

All these renderings have started from the assumption that the words
supposed to be spoken were criminal, and that the consequences described
were of a penal character. But before adopting this view, it seems natural
to ask ourselves why this particular form of crime should have been so fre-
quent as to need proscribing among the peaceable, considerate, and family-
loving men of Sumer and Akkad. Why should sons wish to forswear their
own fathers and mothers, when the genius of domesticity was so strong in
them that they adopted their fathers and mothers-in-law ?

Again, it has been shown that our bi-lingual tablets may well be as ancient
as our earliest deeds ; but if the penal theory of these legal maxims were
correct, they would have to be a great deal more ancient still ; for in the
time of Riagu, we find the legal formula : " Thou art not my son," or " Not
my mother," used by families dealing with the distribution of property, with
purely civil consequences ; namely, to bar the son or daughter who makes
such formal declaration, from a claim to any future share in their parents'
property.

The existence of the formulae does not point to the existence of a pre-
historic period, when parents and children were in the habit of abjuring
natural relationships out of impious enmity. But the formulae and the
early deeds together do point to there having been a time, in the early
development of the family and the State, when family law had become too
strict for the national taste ; when the rights of children, for instance, to
inherit from their parents imposed restrictions which were found irksome
by the versatile, transaction-loving population ; and instead of submitting
to these restrictions, like the Egyptians and the Nairs, the Babylonians
arranged a form of contract by which they were relaxed.

If one son, not a prodigal, but an enterprising trader, wished to receive
at once the portion of goods that fell to him, the parents might be willing
enough to agree, and the other children would lose nothing also, provided
the share was only advanced to him. But if it was a matter of fixed irre-
vocable custom that the children of a mother " who has her husband's
heart," should divide the inheritance equally on their parents' decease,
clearly only a very solemn renunciation of the status and rights of filiation
would avail to prevent the son, who had had his portion in advance, from
nevertheless sharing with the others on their father's death. Now, in ar-
chaic deeds of adoption, the two parties, whose civil act is held to consti-
tute them relatives, say solemnly : " So-and-so is my son ; So-and-so is my
father," and each undertakes to discharge all the duties and offices of sonship
and paternity. Adoption is not unknown in Chaldaea; and wherever it
exists, it carries with it the abandonment, on the part of the adopted child,
of his real relatives. A man does not inherit from two persons as son,
any more than he inherits twice from his own father. And the same for-
mula serves to evade the two irregularities.

There is thus a natural, harmless and intelligible reason why fathers and
mothers and sons should sometimes wish to say, for such and such legal
purposes, " Thou art not my son," etc. In the case of mothers an addi-

364 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

tional motive might and did arise, when a second marriage on the part of
the mother made it desirable for her to provide separately for the children
by different husbands. There are three separate deeds of renunciation be-
longing to the age of Hammurabi or his predecessors, that is, to the twenty-
third century B.C., and their substance can scarcely fail to throw some light
upon the law under which they were executed. The meaning of all three
is practically agreed upon. " For the days to come ; a decision. Ilanierba
has said to S., his mother, 'Not my mother.' From the lands, gardens,
and appurtenances (or hereditaments), whatsoever they may be, he is ex-
cluded. For the days to come ; a decision. S. has said to Ilanierba, her
son, ' Not my son.' From the land, the gardens, and appurtenances he is:
excluded. He shall not transgress. The names of the gods Uruki and
Babbar, and that of Riagu the king, he shall invoke."1

Now Ilanierba, as we already know, was partner, apparently senior
partner, in an important trading, banking, and money-lending firm, and
founder of a family. Is it likely that he began his career by being
drummed out of the town or incurring any ignominy ? He was not dis-
inherited by his father Dada, whose houses, gardens, and so forth he
shared with his brothers after their father's death. The obvious explana-
tion of the deed between him and his mother is, that she had married, or
was about to marry again, and that, either because he was well enough
off without, or because she had already contributed sufficiently to his
advancement, he was content to waive all further claims on her inheritance.
His own wife, who had been married before, executed a deed by which
she gave part of her property to her sons by the former husband, Pirhoum,
on their undertaking to accept this as full satisfaction of their rights.2 The
number of persons involved in this case would have made a recourse to
the formula of renunciation inconvenient, and it is, of course, possible that
the latter carried with it some disabilities connected with the religious rites
of interment, which would be a reason for only resorting to it in cases of
absolute necessity.

In the next example a son is renounced by both his father and his
mother in the course of a deed which opens by enumerating the properties
they design for their eldest son. There is then a defaced and unintelligible
mention of the other sons, and then a passage in which the phrases of the
Akkadian law tablet are reproduced verbatim. "A decision. (M. Revillout
thinks this opening form may be equivalent to 'whereas'.) S. has said
to Etelkasin his father, Thou art not my father ; and to Sinnaid his
mother, Thou art not my mother; they give him silver. A decision.
Whereas Etelkasin and Sinnaid his wife have said to S. their son : Thou
art not my son, the house, the garden and the court, his hereditary
share shall be taken and he will give it. The name of the king he shall
invoke."3

1 Revillout, Les Obligations, pp. 284, 311 Hommel, G.B.A., p. 381. Cf. Meissner,
p. 93. 2 Les Obligations, p. 285. Meissner, No. 109.

3 Revillout, Les Obligations, p. 311.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 365

This is more archaic in form than the corresponding document relating
to Ilanierba, which is drawn up in Semitic- Babylonian. Accordingly the
different effect produced by renunciation on the part of the son and the
parent is not lost sight of. The son renounces his parents, i.e. his claim
on their estate, and they indemnify him for waiving his rights by giving
him money. When he has thus received his share, they, in their turn,
disclaim any further proprietary liability of the parental kind towards him.
He gives up his claim to house, garden, and hereditaments. Meissner,
however, takes this deed as beginning with an adoption of Sinizzu, " their
son," in addition to five children already existing, so that the application
of the penal clauses is only hypothetical.1

The third deed of the same kind and period deals with the renunciation
of a daughter by her mother, who has just been adopted as a daughter by
somebody else. The text is fragmentary, and begins : " And Naramtum
has received the woman Belisunu to the condition of daughter. Decision.
Whereas Daatsin has said to Belisunu, her mother, * Thou art not my
mother.' " 2 Unfortunately there is a lacuna here, and we only know further
that Belisunu reciprocates the disavowal ; " and her daughter has nothing
more to claim." Obviously, when the mother was going to enter another
family and acquire fresh hereditary rights there, she could not be allowed
to deprive her daughter of her right to property derived from the source
that Belisunu rather than her daughter was deserting. Doubtless in this
as in the other cases, an equivalent was given at once and future claims
waived.

Let us now ask ourselves : Is there any sense consistent with the pur-
port of these three deeds, in which the ominous-sounding intimations
of the law tablet can be interpreted ? In the first clause, Oppert's version
is substantially what we should expect, if the father can be taken as the
nominative in 1. 7 : " The son says to his father, Thou art not my father ;
the father gives him security or money " (equal to his share in the in-
heritance). " The son says to his mother, Thou art not my mother : they
take the city to witness and bid him quit her house." If these laws are
not penal, the supposed reference to mutilations must rest on misinterpre-
tation, and the doubtful clause will refer, as Oppert supposed, to legal
formalities of execution.

The way to verify the correctness of any alternative reading is to see
whether the differences between the civil consequence of renouncing the
two parents and being renounced by them, correspond to the results
actually met with, when the initiative proceeds respectively from father,
mother, or son. Our three texts are not enough for this purpose, but
others will doubtless be made available in time. Meanwhile we may note
that, according to this law, the son is apparently expected to inherit
property from his father, and to live in his mother's house. This notion
that the materfamilias is the natural, and, in fact, the only house-holder,

1 No. 98.

2 G.B.A., 385 ; Les Obligations, pp. 311, 318.

366 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

is, we shall find, very widely diffused among offshoots of the earliest
domestic race. Semitic influence caused it to be lost sight of in Babylonia,
but these laws are the best evidence we could have that it prevailed among
the primitive inhabitants.

In the next clauses Oppert's early version is alone in introducing the
idea of imprisonment, in the house, etc. ; all the other versions substitute
that of expulsion from them. Now let us read : " A father says to his son,
Thou art not my son : he is excluded from the house and hereditaments.
A mother says to her son, Thou art not my son : he is excluded from her
house."

This is less exciting than the theory of undutiful sons immured in the
foundations of the ancestral dwelling, or cut off from the possibility of
perpetuating an impious race. But the men of Sumer and Akkad were
a sober, positive-minded set of people. Ilanierba and his contemporaries
bought and sold 4,000 years ago, very much as the black-haired people
of China do now ; and as the Chinese themselves, among whom filial piety
takes the place of a State religion, think it right that a childless uncle
should adopt a brother's son, so in Babylonia, such breaches of the natural
family tie were probably only effected in the course of amicable family
arrangements, where the monetary interests of all parties were considered.

The last two clauses respecting the law of divorce offer fresh difficulties ;
the Gortyn code l imposes different terms on the husband whose wife
leaves him on account of his ill-conduct, and one who is in no way to
blame for the separation, the theory of the age being that he had received
more advantage from the relationship while it lasted than the wife did.
But if parents and children could disown each other amicably, we should
also have expected the law to provide for divorce by mutual consent ;
whereas no translation has been proposed giving them anything but a
penal character. Two marriage contracts given by Meissner 2 seem, how-
ever, to show that they are only penal in the same sense as those already
discussed. As in contracts of adoption, the parents and son agree to let
the same consequences follow on separation as the law ordains in the case
of natural families, so here the penalty invoked against husband or wife, in
case they transgress the covenant, is more or less the same as that which
puzzled translators in the law tablet. And as we can scarcely imagine
either husband or wife solemnly contracting to drown each other in case
of disagreement, we must conclude that the sense of the words has not
even yet been correctly seized.

The clause by which damages are due to the divorced wife is quite
clear. One contract tablet contains an express reference to " the money
of separation ;" it is apparently a deed of divorce, and runs : " Samas-rabi
has rejected (or cast off) Naramtu. She bears her ziku, and she has
received the money of separation. If Naramtu marries another, Samas-
rabi will no longer love her (?) " 3 Later Semitic law,, while restricting the
right of divorce to the husband, has retained the tradition of the wife's
1 Post, p. 477. 2 LmCtt Nos. 89, 90. 3 /£., 91.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 367

claim to compensation. In modern Jewish marriage contracts, the amount
of the wife's dowry and her Kethuba are specified together ; the latter,
like the Nekyah of the Moslems, being a settlement on the bride of the
money which is to be paid in case of divorce. A propos of the curious
clause relating to the possible marriage of the divorced wife, the translator
quotes from the Ana ittisu l series a paragraph rendered : " If she after-
wards marry the man of her heart, her first husband cannot plead
invalidity," and suggests the alteration of a syllable which will give the
same meaning here ; but if the institution of the kethuba is as old as
Hammurabi, the Oriental rule forbidding the husband who has divorced
his wife to take her back again, except after another marriage and divorce,
may be primitive also, and if so, both the rule and this contract would be
inspired by a (lost) Sumerian version of the French proverb : " On revient
toujours a ses premiers amours." The legal kethuba of half a mina repre-
sented the value of a house or slave, and would buy a moderate yearly
allowance of com.

Another marriage contract contains a clause binding both parties not to
dissolve the marriage or rescind the contract ; and no penalty is invoked,
as the married pair agree not to take the legal remedy of divorce with its
attendant consequences. And it is obvious that a law punishing conjugal
infidelity with either drowning or ducking must have become a dead
letter if it was open to any couple that pleased to " contract themselves
out of the Act." Bearing these considerations in mind, we must make
what we can of the three contracts given by Meissner, as if Haupt's
version of the law was unquestioned.

" Bastu, daughter of Belisunu, priestess of Samas and daughter of
Urzibitu, is taken in marriage and wifeship by Remu, son of Samhatu

. . shekels is her Morgengabe. Since she has received it she is
content. If Bastu to Remu, her husband, says, Thou art not my
husband, they strangle and throw her in the water. If Remu to Bastu,
his wife, says, Thou art not my wife, he will give her ten shekels of
silver as money of separation." There are two points to be noticed here ;
as the wife's mother and her parent are named, it is possible that Bastu
was an heiress in her own right, and that it was in this character that
the contract invokes against her the penalty imposed by law on the
husband who repudiates culpably ; an arrangement for which there would
be a precedent in Egypt. The mention of a gift from the husband to the
wife, and her satisfaction therewith, also suggests the " woman's gift " of
late Egyptian contracts. The use of a double phrase, as if marriage and
consortship were a relation, admitting of two parts or degrees, is also
suggestive of something answering to the Egyptian distinction between a
wife and an established wife, or between a contract involving a personal
and one extending to a proprietary partnership. If such a distinction
existed in Babylonia, traces of it will no doubt be found in the surviving

1 These are bi-lingual vocabularies, in which the commonest phrases and words of the
ancient laws are given and conjugated or declined.

368 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

deeds, and it can do no harm to experiment with this key before despair-
ing of the solution of enigmatic texts.

Another marriage contract which may help to interpret the above is that
of Istar Ummi, daughter of Arzazu and Lamasutu, who was given in marriage
and wifeship to Arad Sin, by her father and mother. He gives to her
parents one-third of a mina and a slave as Morgengabe. It concludes :
" If Arad Sin casts off Istar Umrni, he shall pay a mina of silver ; " J what
will happen if she leaves him, is at present concealed by the clay cover
which the custodians of the Berlin Museum would not allow Herr
Meissner to remove ; but it is to be hoped that they will themselves take
steps to ascertain, without endangering the legibility of the record. Until
a larger number of contracts are available for comparison, it would be
premature to conjecture that they may fall into two groups, according to
whether the husband or the wife is the capitalist.

Daughters share normally with sons in the inheritance of their parents ;
but in one or two deeds there are signs of their holding property in other
ways. By a deed of gift, not a marriage contract, A., her father, and
T. S., her mother, convey to their daughter B. the following property :
a sar of cultivated land, with house ; one slave, one . . . ; ten shekels
silver, one shekel gold as finger-ring, one ditto, ditto, as ear-ring ; five
garments of one sort, ten of another, two of each of two other varieties,
and one each of yet other two ; two stones of different kinds, two ear-
rings, four spoons (or other utensils) of copper, one . . ., seven chairs,
one . . . (?) chair ; five each of two unknown articles, five wooden
ditto, and two other stones, or articles of stone. All this is given by the
parents to their daughter B. : " In any place where she pleases she may
found her house with (?) R., her father." 2 This is very perplexing, because
when a woman " founds her house " with property derived from one or
both of her parents, she normally does so with her husband, according to
one system, or with her brother, according to another ; while, if a woman
is adopted, as a man might be, by a childless relative, it is usually with a
view to inheriting the property of the adoptive father, and the inheritance
of the natural parents is renounced instead of given in advance. The
document might conceivably be explained by a combination of the two
situations ; if the father of an heiress daughter is willing to let her marry
the son of some other man, and give the latter's grandchildren all the
rights belonging to descendants of " the father of their mother," a motive
would be supplied at the same time for the gift and the adoption. But,
of course, this is purely hypothetical.

The other case of property held by a woman apart from the paternal
inheritance occurs in a deed by which brothers divide the inheritance of
their father and their sister, Iltani, "which she in the house of Sin and of
the god Sa-Sassa. Samas . . . " 3 The same name, Iltani, occurs in the

1 Meissner, I.e., p. 149. 2 Ib. , No. 10.

3 Meissner, No. 105 Cf. perhaps Bull, de Cor. Hel., 1882, p. 276. Ramsay,
Church in the Roman Empire, p. 398, and Contemporary Review, Oct. 1893, p. 371.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 369

most difficult of the marriage contracts given by Meissner, the considera-
tion of which has been intentionally left to the last. It runs as follows :
" Iltani, the sister of Taramka, the daughter of ... has Arad Samas,
son of Ilu-ennan, received in marriage from her father, Samas-satu. Iltani
is his wife. He will provide for her establishment and well-being, and
carry her chair to the temple of Merodach. All the children already born
or to be born hereafter are her children. ... If she says to Iltani,
her sister, ' Thou art not my sister,' then ... he shall brand her
and sell her for gold. And if Arad Sin says to his wife, * Thou art not my
wife,' he will give her a mina of silver. But if both (Taramka and Iltani)
say to Arad Samas, ' Thou art not our husband,' they shall be strangled,
and thrown into the river." l According to Meissner, this extraordinary
text refers to a marriage of the Leah and Rachel kind. Iltani is described
as the sister of Taramka, because Taramka is already Arad Samas' wife ;
he supposes the lacunae to contain, first, the penalty to be imposed on
Taramka in the event of her renouncing the sister who has been made her
rival, and then the familiar formula of renunciation, attributed to Iltani,
saying to Arad Samas, "Thou art not my husband," which is, to be
punished in the way ordained by the law for a son renouncing his father.

The whole text is well adapted to inspire one of the liveliest of Assyrio-
logical controversies ; but apart from the linguistic difficulties arising out
of the use of genderless pronouns, we may observe that Taramka is
nowhere called the wife of Arad Samas, and that in all the other cases
where the consequences of renouncing relationships are described, the re-
lationship clearly carries with it some legal claim to a joint title in the
family estate. The law tablet says nothing about what is to be done
to brothers who say, "Thou art not my sister," or to sisters who say,
" Thou art not my brother," for the obvious reason that this relationship
carries no proprietary consequences, except at the one moment — of
dividing the parental inheritance — for which the law enjoins the duty
of fraternal affection.

The only circumstances under which the relation of brother to sister
could carry such consequences would be in communities of the Nair
or Nabataean type, among which it may be necessary to adopt a sister in
order to obtain a legitimate heir.2 There are too many doubtful points in
the text for it to be safe to form any conjecture at present as to what
Taramka really has to do in the matter, but it is tolerably certain that
either through Taramka, or in some other way, Iltani is a lady with a sepa-
rate estate, and that, either by nature or adoption, she stands to some one
in the relation of sister ; and that this person, on renouncing the relation-
ship, passes out of the family community to which she belongs, in the same
way that an emancipated, renounced, or foris-familiated son does.
Meanwhile, the duties of the husband are set forth with particularity, as in
Egypt the amount of pin and pocket money to be at the bride's disposal

1 No. 89.

2 Pos^ Book III. chaps, viii., x.

P.C. B B

370 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

is set forth. She is to have everything handsome about her, including, it
would seem, " sittings " in the fashionable temple of 4,000 years ago.

Another noticeable point about this deed is that it is evidently a post-
nuptial settlement, and a number of deeds by which the father, or the
father and mother, adopt a child of their own, seem to show that at this
date it was common in Babylonia for the son to be " established " as heir
retrospectively, instead .of . being, as in Egypt, so constituted in advance, by
the marriage settlement of the parents. This is only what might have been
expected, if the motive, in establishing the wife, was to establish the
hereditary rights of the children ; and the Babylonian deeds being much
the earliest of the kind, it is natural that they should show their purpose
most clearly.

By one deed a man adopts his own son, Arad Ishara ; " he shall be his
son, and inherit with his sons." l This is practically the sole meaning
and motive of adoption. By another, a father and mother adopt their own
son. " Ahiopiam is his brother." If they disown him, " he shall take his
share like the children of I. and N. (the adopting parents), and go away." 2
One is tempted to conjecture that Ahiopiam is the eldest brother, to whom
it will fall to divide the inheritance, if the parents do not — as they seem
partly disposed to do — divide it themselves.

It may be that when a sister is mentioned by name, in connection with
family property, it is for the same reason, because she is the eldest child.
In the deed of adoption of Ubar Samas, by a husband and wife, they say :
" He is their eldest son." 3 And similarly, when a priestess of Samas
and her husband adopt Samas-abitu, it is said : " He shall be the son of
B. and H. Samas-abitu is their elder brother," 4 i.e. the elder brother of their
children. This deed continues by stating the legal penalties, according
to the code, for renunciation on either side : and it is also remarkable
because Samas-abitu, though adopted as eldest son, is not the son of the
adopting parents, but is adopted from a woman and her daughter M., and
her son T., as if his recommendation was to be the grandson of the
former.

An action tried before the judges of the gate of the goddess Nin-marki,
in the reign of Rim-sin, shows that sonship by itself gives an indefeasible
title. Mar-martu bought a garden from Sin-magir. Ilubani said : " I am
the son, it is mine ! " The witnesses of Mar-martu (who are a kind of jury)
agreed, and Rim-sin awarded the garden and house to Ilubani. Then
Sinmuballit challenges Ilubani's title, and he swears before the judges of
the gate of Nin-marki : " I am the son of Sin-magir ; he adopted
me, and my seal (i.e. the contract of adoption) is unbroken." The
previous decision was re-affirmed, and the parties swear by Sin, Samas,
Marduk, and the king Hammurabi to observe the decision.5 The father,
even of an adoptiveson, cannot alienate family property without the con-
sent and knowledge of the latter, so that the rights of children are in no
degree less developed in Babylonia than Egypt.

1 Meissner, l.c ., No. 96. 2 /£., Np. 97. » Ib., No. 95. 4 Ib., No. 94. » Ib., No. 43.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 371

A princess is among the witnesses of the marriage contract of Iltani, and
the following deed of adoption is witnessed by seven women and only two
men, as if it were a matter of harim interest. It declares that a slave,
whom A., her father, and L., her mother, have taken as "daughter of
earth," is their daughter ; if they give her anything from affection, none of
her brothers will complain j1 just as the sons of Yang Che2 are exhorted,
in his will, not to grumble at any presents their mother may make, out of
the family income, to her poor, married daughter.

Four deeds8 refer to divisions of property amongst brothers in the same
family. First we have five-sixths of a sar of house and garden assigned to
Salustu, the son of Arad Sin, which he has divided with Sin-ikisa and
another brother. Then Sin-ikisa and Ibni-samas each take part in a deed
whereby their joint property is shared between one of them and Urra-
nasir. Lastly, I. and N. share half a sar with A. and I., the sons of
Sin-ikisa, their brothers. The house belongs to the four. " One brother has
shared justly with another" — which is perhaps the more meritorious when,
as appears to be the case here, they are half-brothers only. The first of
these deeds is executed in the name of the gods, of Sinmuballit and the
city of Sippara. There is nothing calling for special notice in a deed
whereby four brothers divide the whole property of their father, or that by
which Hissatu and Belitsunu divide the lands, house, and appurtenances
of their father. But the eldest son of Arad Ulmassitu, who has already
appeared in the double character of landlord and tenant, seems to execute
the customary partition in a rather arbitrary manner, as if at his own good
will and pleasure, without obligation, perhaps with brothers who had
not been legally established as " his brothers." 4

The last tablet in this valuable series is a contract by which three
children of Apilia agree not to litigate with S. and U. (presumably their
nephews) about a house which U., son of Apilia, their brother, has left
behind him ; a document which bears the stamp of a primitive age, in
which uncles are apt to dispute successfully the inheritance of their
brothers' children.

The more such documents as these are multiplied, the more intelligible
we may hope they will become. At present every publication is hazardous,
because the best renderings and interpretations are sure to be wrong
on some points, but such provisional errors will not prevent the gradual
advance of knowledge, especially if, by the grace of Nebo and Merodach
and the shades of the kings and cities of Sumer and Akkad, brother
Assyriologist is " loving to his brothers " — in the thorny task of cuneiform
transliteration and translation. >

1 Meissner, Lc.y No. 99. 2 Post, Book IV. chap. xvii.

3 Meissner, I.e., Nos. 101-104. * /£., Nos. 105-7.

372 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

§ 2. LATER MARRIAGE CONTRACTS AND OTHER DEEDS EXECUTED

BY WOMEN.

There had been time for a great many things to happen between the
composition of the Sumerian code regulating renunciations between
husband and wife, and the drafting of the marriage contract of our old
friend the banker Nebo-ahi-iddin, who in matrimonial matters was of the
school of M. Dumas fils. In the interval the Pyramids and the Labyrinth
had been built, Egypt had become great and contended with Assyria for
the mastery of Western Asia, and had already traversed some stages on her
downward course. The kingdoms of Eastern and Southern Arabia had
flourished and decayed. The Phoenicians had spread over the known
world. Syria and Palestine had laid their claims to a place in the world's
history. Susianians, Elamites, Medes, and Armenians had in turn com-
manded the heights between the Caspian and the Persian Gulf. Greece
and Italy had been settled ; Troy built and destroyed, and — what has
more to do with the matter on hand — Semitic influence had been at work
for nearly 2,000 years in Mesopotamia itself.

Here is the marriage contract of the banker: "Nebo-ahi-iddin to
Daliliessu spoke thus : the woman Manaatesaggil, thy daughter, the noble
lady here present, let her be my wife ! Daliliessu heard him, and the
woman Manaatesaggil, his daughter, a noble maiden in marriage he gives
him. The day that Nebo-ahi-iddin abandons the woman Manaatesaggil or
takes another as well, he will give her six mina of silver, and she will go to
a place of tsimaat. The day that the woman Manaatesaggil (is) with
another man, by a sword of iron she shall die. Not to transgress,
they invoke the spirit of Nebo and Merodach, their gods, and of
Nebuchadnezzar the king, their master. For the sealing of the contract in
the presence of So-and-so." 1 Then follow the names of five witnesses.
The bridegroom himself acts as scribe to the exhilarating document. It is
not in any sense typical, but its existence helps to explain how it could
have been thought possible that the infidelity of Sumerian wives was
punished by drowning. Probably it only represents the personal eclec-
ticism of the banker. The first clauses are evidently modelled on the
usual Egyptian form of marriage contract in which the husband promises
to pay such a sum of money if he despises his wife, or takes another,
But there is no such distinction in Sumerian law, which probably did not
recognise polygamy ; if the man divorced, the payment was due from him,
whatever his motive for the act might be, and apart from any marriage
contract.

M. Revillout inquires whether the place of tsimaat, which suggests
silence and seclusion, is to be regarded as a kind of convent ; but it may
mean only a place apart, a separate establishment, such as, in fact, a
Towarek is bound by public opinion to provide for a divorced wife, before
he is morally free to marry again. Another marriage contract, given by
1 Les Obligations, pp. 337-9.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 373

M. Oppert, simply stipulates that if a man abandons his wife, and takes
another, he shall give her six mina, "and she shall go where she
likes." i

The last clause about the sword of iron is purely Semitic, not, of course,
a personal invention of the scribe, but derived by him from some code
conceived in the same spirit as that of the Jews, or perhaps direct from
them. We have given the first place to this exceptional agreement for the
sake of contrast and comparison, but the majority of such deeds, under
the Babylonian empire, only set forth what property is given with the
maiden by her relatives, or sometimes record an addition to the original
dowry made, perhaps, by a brother or grandmother, " in the satisfaction of
their hearts," as the tablets say, or in more modern phrase, " out of love
and affection." Here is a complete document of the ordinary sort :
" Marduksuruzur, in the satisfaction of his heart, gives in dowry to Nebo-
banziru five mina of silver, four slaves, thirty sheep, and the enjoyment of
a house with the woman Suma-ibrisa, his daughter. Nebobanziru receives
her dowry from the hands of Marduksuruzur. Babylon, the sixth Ulul in
the first year of Neriglissar, king of Babylon." 2 One of the slaves thus
conveyed was afterwards mortgaged by the husband and redeemed by the
father-in-law.

In the year 564 B.C., a woman, Rimat, sells one of her slaves to N. for
twenty-three shekels, in order that the price may be added to the dowry of
Belitsunu, daughter of Neboziritapsi ; the latter, who is Rimat's husband,
joins with her in signing the security for peaceful possession given to the
purchaser.3 Another deed of the time of Nabonidus shows us a father,
who, having given his daughter, on her marriage, a house at Erech and
four female slaves, afterwards thought better of it, and undertook to give
his son-in-law " with his daughter," the further large sum of fifty mina as
residue of the dowry, also a male slave who had been received in satisfac-
tion of a debt of one mina. These goods are always said to be given
" with " the wife, as in the case of Egyptian marriage contracts with the
formula, " If she stays, she stays with them ; if she goes, she goes with
them." And M. Revillout supposes the Athenian law, which gave a wife
right of maintenance against any one holding any portion of her dowry, to
be probably derived from Babylonia.

Nebo-ahi-iddin was a son of Sulai, so it was in accordance with the com-
mon custom of calling children after their grandfathers that the eldest son
of Nebo's sister, Elilltunu, bore the same name. Sulai's daughter, Belit-
sunu, received two slaves from her grandmother as a gift, in addition to
the eight rods of land which her father had given her. Both these gifts
are spoken of as made to her, and not to her husband with her. The
grandmother ends by invoking the gods Merodach and Zarpanit, to pro-
phesy good fortune, and prays : " May the god Nebo, the divine scribe of
Esaggil, make her days to come joyous ! " * The tablets do not tell us

1 Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie, vol. iii. p. 182.

2 Les Obligations, p. 329. 3 2b., p. 331. 4 /£., p. 336.

374 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

whether the marriage begun under such tender auguries was happy, but
they do tell us that it was short-lived. Twelve years later the same Belit-
sunu is given in marriage by her brother, together with " all that she
possesses," including a daughter by her first husband.

In a deed translated by M. Oppert 1 a woman makes over to her daughter
all her property in town and country, except what she had already given
to her on her marriage. The mother reserves the usufruct of all the pro-
perty to herself for life, but secures the reversion to her daughter, who is
bound not to assign it to any one, except her own husband. A son of the
donor witnesses the deed in his sister's favour.

There are other deeds in which the brother, instead of the father, and
no doubt after his death, constitutes the dowry of his sister in regular form.
It was the rule for daughters to receive their share of the family inherit-
ance upon marriage, and this being so, of course they could not share with
their brothers again on the father's death. But there is little indication
of the tutelage of women in Babylonia, where the spirit of the ancient cus-
tom was all the other way, and the action of the brothers would seem to
be suggested simply by convenience. The daughter did not want her
share till she married, and did want it then. If her father died while she
was a child, the rest of the family managed the common stock out of which
her share had to come; and whenever the time came, the eldest son, acting
in his father's place, conveyed it in due form as her dowry.

There was practically no limit to the civil capacity of women in Babylonia,
though they do not seem, after the time of Hammurabi, to have claimed
the barren honour of witnessing deeds. In innumerable contracts husband
and wife are conjoined as debtors, creditors and security; the wife is
made a party to any action in which her dowry is involved, but she also
acts independently, e.g. as security for her husband with her brother-in-
law. Women appear by themselves as creditors, and a wife may stand in
that relation to her husband. In one case a woman acts as security for a
man's debt to another woman. They are also liable singly for debts in
money and goods, or in connection with a case of antichresis. A woman
with her son is in debt to another woman ; and again a woman associates
her eldest son with herself as creditor for part of the price of a house
forming her dowry ; but this is purely voluntary on her part, as the other
relations between her and her sons show.

This Gugua was a rich woman, and the way in which she disposes of
her property shows that she had no less control over it than Egyptian
mothers had, though like them she used her powers mainly for the advan-
tage of her children. She had five sons, and to each of the four younger
she gave the sum of one mina and thirty-six shekels, without the interven-
tion or assistance of the eldest son. This gift is only referred to in another
deed for the purpose of saying that Belziribni, the eldest son, is not to dis-
pute with them about it. On this understanding she makes over to him
certain investments — a bill for one mina upon Nebo-ahi-iddin ; half a mina

1 Revue d'Assyriologie, iii. p. 89.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 375

and five shekels,1 secured upon a house ; a credit for one-third of a mina
on another woman, and a plot of ground forming part of her own dowry —
all upon trust, that he will give her so many measures (of grain) daily as
long as it pleases her to live on the interest of her money.2

The provision for the eldest son is thus appreciably larger than that for
either of the others, but it is subject to the mother's life interest. The
others get money down, but he has the reversion of an extra one-third of
a mina and the land on condition of providing for his mother's mainten-
ance. Gugua, however, does not intend to run the risk of Belziribni
turning out a male Regan or Goneril ; and she not only reserves the right
of taking the property into her own hands again, but stipulates that her
son is not to mortgage it to any one without her consent. This deed is
drawn up " with the assistance " of a daughter of Gugua ; and in another,
executed for the benefit of a certain Bel-ahi-erib, she has the assistance of
the woman Risatum, his mother. In this case Gugua has invested one-
third of a mina at the usual rate of interest with Nebo-ahi-iddin ; she intends
the capital to belong to Bel-ahi-erib — presumably a grandson — but mean-
while reserves the interest to herself, and for that purpose represents him as
her debtor for the interest, while undertaking not to reclaim the capital.

An interesting deed translated by Dr. Peiser gives a somewhat different
view of the circumstances under which a pension of the same kind as
Gugua's might be desired by a parent in difficulties. According to this
text,3 a man says to his daughter : "Z., my brother, has repulsed me ; R.,
my son, has abandoned me ; thy father is before thee : his . . . shalt
thou measure to me, and as long as thou livest give me maintenance, food,
ointment and clothing. My revenue for the measuring in the house of
Anu, in the sanctuary of Ib and Belit-ikalli, and in the field ... my
joint share in it with Z., my brother, I will assign to thee." The daughter
agrees, and the father (? a spendthrift) undertakes not to sell these remnants
of his inheritance to any one else for money, not to pledge or in any way
diminish it, nor to give it away for favour.

The translation of the opening clauses may perhaps be emended later ;
it is not usual for Babylonian deeds to rehearse the motives for the acts
recorded in them. But it is quite equitable that an absolute reversionary
right in the father's property should be secured to the child who undertakes
by deed to provide for his future maintenance. Doubtless the moral duty
of providing for indigent parents must have been recognised, but judging
from existing deeds, every one in Babylonia, from the slave to the dotard,
had some realizable property, and to live on the interest of such property
was easy for any one who had a son or daughter able to manage and will-
ing to inherit it.

1 I.e. thirty-five shekels. This clumsy way of reckoning is due to the habit of describ-
ing any number of sixths of a mina as a fraction of it, and adding the odd shekels. The
fraction was always equivalent to some number of tens, so there was no real difficulty in
calculating the total.

2 Les Obligations, p. 346.

3 Dr. F. E. Peiser. Keilinschriftliche AcUnstilcke aus Babyknischen Stadte, p. 19.

376 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

Some of the other deeds given by Dr. Peiser seem to deal with the sale
of certain revenues in kind, resembling the " temple days " of the Egyptian
priests ; l others record the sale of a field by a woman and her husband ;
the exchange of two houses, the difference between the value of them being
made up in money ; and a lawsuit, in which the defeated party proposes
to give his houses in Dirl in lieu of the money he has been sentenced to
pay.2 Where the subject is more complicated Dr. Peiser shows himself at
once more cautious than M. Revillout and less imaginative, and upon
those terms he does not add much to the materials of the latter.

There are two causes of a semi-contentious character which illustrate
the law respecting the property of husband and wife. The father-in-law
of Iddinamarduk, the son of Basai, hesitated to hand over to him his
daughter's dowry, because I.'s father, Basai, was being proceeded against
by creditors holding a general mortgage on his effects.3 Evidently it was
the rule for the property of father and sons to be held together in common,
and unless otherwise protected, the son's wife's property might be claimed
as an asset too. In this case, however, Iddinamarduk had some slaves,
two women and five children, forming a private personalty of his own. He
gives these to his wife as securing or representing her dowry, and after
this apparently, his father's creditors were unable to touch them. On the
other hand, the wife's money was added to the family estate out of which
Basai's creditors hoped to be paid. After this deed the slaves in question
could not be alienated by husband or wife alone, only by the two acting
jointly, if it so pleased them.

The other case was that of Bunanitum,4 a wife, who had traded with her
husband on her dowry. They had increased their original store, but
wished to buy a piece of land worth more than the sum they had realized.
They borrowed what was wanting and bought it ; that is, the original
lender bought it as for himself (this person is the same as the cautious
father-in-law of the last story), and paid for it in full. Three years later
the husband and wife borrowed what was wanting to make up the price, at
interest from Iddinamarduk, and after this the house was virtually their
own, though they had a small debt to pay off. At this point, to prevent
the wife's dowry disappearing in the joint estate, the husband gave the
new possession in trust to his wife as a security for that portion of its price
which came out of her dowry.

All these facts were brought out in the course of a suit which was de-
cided in the wife's favour, when her deceased husband's brother claimed
the property as part of his inheritance. The court ordered him first to
repay the dowry, and the balance of the debt still owing for the fraction
of the price which had been borrowed, and then he could have the estate,
which in the interval had served as a double pledge, the husband and wife

1 Loc. cit., vii.-ix. Cf. Meissner, No. 41. In the reign of Rim-sin, four sons of Zazia,
who are non-suited, claim a yearly right to " five days' revenues in the house of Sin, six-
teen days of the chambers of the gods in the house of Belit, and eight days of the same
in the house of Gula."

2 Z.c., p. 13, Nos. 12, 13. 3 Les Obligations, p. 345. 4 Ib.y p. 358.

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 377

enjoying the use of it all the time. It will be observed that the wife does
not inherit from her husband, but this is not a disability or disadvantage
when she is usually as well off as he is ; and in the event of her surviving
and having children, they are provided for out of their father's inheritance,
without having any legal right to demand an immediate division of hers.

Wills were unknown, but, as in Egypt, the parents could give effect in
their own lifetime to any special adjustment of the various shares they
desired, which would not follow in strict course of law. M. Revillout
also quotes a deed by which a father, desiring apparently to make some
further provision for his wife and daughter, drew a bill on his brother in
their favour, which was honoured without demur.1

When the wife as such has a legal claim to share with her own children
in her husband's estate, this is usually an indication that there is little or
no other provision for her, i.e. that dowries are small and property does not
descend in the female line. The affinities of the primitive Sumerian
marriage law, on the other hand, are with the systems in which property
descends so exclusively through women that the husband's estate does not
even go to his own children, who are provided for by their mother ; and it
would therefore be a mistake to attribute this trait to Semitic influence.
If a wife died without children, her dowry returned " to the house of her
fathers," just as the husband's property under similar circumstances re-
turned to his family. If a widow " set her face to go down to another
house," i.e. to marry again, she was entitled by law to her original dowry
and any property she might have received by gift from her first husband,
in addition of course to anything belonging to her in her own right. A
mutilated passage from a tablet of legal precedents, implying that the
children of parents married by settlement take only one-third of their
parents' property, can hardly be relied on. It is almost or quite unheard
of for an inheritance to be shared between uncles and nephews, and as
regards the mother's inheritance, the fact that her dowry reverts to her
own family, when there are no children, shows that when there are
children, they take it instead.

The irrevocable step in the marriage contract is the transfer of the
wife's dowry ; before that there is only a contract or betrothal, but after it
" the father-in-law and the son-in-law cannot deny each other."

§ 3. FILIATION AND ADOPTION.

The subject of adoption was alluded to in connection with the opposite
ceremony, of the renunciation of sonship or paternity ; but long after the
latter had become obsolete, deeds of adoption were executed with formali-
ties closely resembling those of marriage contracts. M. Revillout has
translated one such tablet from Sippara relating to Sapi-kalbi, a boy who
had been brought up in the temple of Samas ; his tribe, but not his father,
is mentioned. His would-be parents describe him by name, by tribe, and

1 Les Obligations, p. 353«

378 ANCIENT BABYLONIA.

by his office in the temple, and then say : " Grant this boy to us in son-
ship and let him be our son." l The text continues : " To-day they
establish him as son of Samas-belit and of Kapta his wife. Sapi-kalbi is
given as son into the hands of Samas-belit and of the woman Kapta." We
note that here, as in the formulas of renunciation, the two sides of the
relationship are distinctly recognised ; the status of child, like that of
parent, clearly has denned rights attached to it.

Then follows a clause that the deed is not to be transgressed or violated,
and it is witnessed by five persons, two of whom belonged to the tribe of
the scribes of Sippara, and one to the tribe of the scribes of the god
Samas ; and then, before the name of the scribe who wrote the tablet, it is
added, that it was made with the assistance of the woman Busasa, mother
of Sapi-kalbi. The curious thing is that the name assigned to this " son
of nobody " means " from the mouth of the dogs," or something like it,
and so contains an unmistakable allusion to one of the phrases in the
ambiguous text which has been called the " Story of a Foundling."

A bi-lingual tablet, that begins with phrases about deposits, dowry,
possession, houses and marriage, goes on according to Oppert : 2 " He
who father and mother has not. He who his father and mother knew not.
In the tank his (earliest) memory. By the streets his dwelling place.
From the mouth of the dogs he took him : from the beak of the crows he
snatched him. Before the diviner he laid him. The marks of his feet3 in
the table of genealogies he examined. He gave him to a nurse. For
three years they established for the nurse the number of her garments and
her head-dress. Every day and always they concealed from him his origin.
He made his marriage advantageous. He came of age. He had him to
son."

Then the text becomes disconnected : "Infancy; his infancy; accord-
ing to his infancy. Boyhood ; his boyhood ; according to his boyhood.
He wrote out his filiation. He showed the writing. Education ; his
education ; according to his education." Here another column begins,
and one is tempted to persevere through the delectus by broken and
delusive hints. There is something about money, marriage, legitimate
sons and an elder brother. " The elder brother of the former family takes
the price (?). Afterwards he wandered forth ; he obtained leave to depart.
He roamed the streets ; on account of his youth ; on account of his youth
he extruded him ; on account of his infancy he turned him out. . . .
He made his genealogy. . . . He knew his filiation and he restored
him the rights of his brotherhood. He wrote him a tablet of filiation.
He made the rule (or the rights?) of his paternity, he granted him a house
and furniture. For him the traveller introduced to his father whomsoever
pleased him (?). He treated with pride whomsoever he introduced (?)."

1 The frequency of acts of adoption may perhaps be inferred from the title "adopted
son of Bel," borne by the kings of Babylon. Dr. F. E. Peiser, Keilinschriftliche Acten-
stiicke aus Babylonischen Stddte^ p. ix. 2 Doc. jur., p. 42.

3 Can the priests of Chaldaea have forestalled Mr. Gallon's system of identification by
finger-prints ?

DOMESTIC RELATIONS AND FAMILY LAW. 379

The first halves of the next three lines are wanting ; they refer to paying
some part of a mina of silver to a wife.

All this does not supply a very solid foundation for inquiry. The view
that suggests itself first, is that the Story of a Foundling is a kind of variant
of the Sargon legend : dangers from birds, beasts and evil men have to be
escaped, and the first romancers, who had the pick of all available situa-
tions, naturally took the strongest and conceived the hero, exposed to all
these perils, as a fatherless and motherless infant. Oriental romance,
before and since the Arabian nights, takes for its favourite hero, as has
been pointed out,1 the character of a widow's son. In the prehistoric
days, when the men of Akkad may have named their mothers instead of
their fathers, no special disability attached to those who knew their mother
only, as there did to the modern Sapi-kalbi. But it is possible that, as the
old order disappeared, leaving behind it a not inglorious fame, a sort of
romantic tradition gathered about the sons of mothers — from Sargon to
Jack of the Bean-stalk — and that in this respect also the world of fairy
tale has preserved an echo of ancient, social tradition.

We are on solid ground in the interesting recognition of the foster-
mother's right to costume and head-dress, and from the way in which it is
defined, the services of the class cannot have been in use for foundlings
only. It is clear also that in the Semitic-Babylonian mixed system of law,
which became established, throughout the land of Kaldu and Kardunias,
tablets of filiation lay at the root of all civil and proprietary rights. We
get a hint that an orphan son, whose mother had left him, might have his
status challenged ; but in all communities, the desire to get rid of an infant
heir has appealed to the less amiable feelings of humanity, and the only
new element suggested here is that there was a prospect of redress by
appeal to the literary priests, who knew all the genealogies, and might
verify the claim of one who really represented a missing^ de familie.

The mention, in the tablet previously quoted,2 of a scribe of " births,"
and " a giver of names," shows that some official records of population
were kept, and these, in the early days of the evolution of family law, may
have served as evidence to hereditary rights, as the private records of
Chinese families do now.

There are two directions from which we may hope that further light may
be thrown in future upon the primitive family law of ancient Babylonia :
the discovery and improved translation of additional tablets, legal and
literary ; and a careful study of the oldest portions of the Rabbinical
writings, carried out comparatively, with a view to distinguishing what may
be called the pre-Semitic elements in them from the rest. The interesting
nature of the fragmentary information already accessible shows how
fruitful both lines of inquiry would prove, and they will be followed up, no
doubt, if popular curiosity can be enlisted on behalf of the investigation.

1 7^he Women of Turkey, by Miss Garnett and J. Stuart- Glennie, p. 345.

2 Ante, p. 342.

BOOK III.

FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

" For when the greater States conquer and enslave the
lesser, as the Syracusans have done the Locrians, who appear
to be the best governed people in that part of the world, or
as the Athenians have done the Ceans (and there are ten
thousand instances of the same sort of thing), all that is not
to the point ; let us endeavour rather to form a conclusion
about the various institutions themselves, and say nothing at
present of victories and defeats." — Plato.

" Diese neu auftretenden Ideen sind nun aber nicht erst
durch die hohere Kultur erzeugt worden, sondern sie beruhen
auf uralten Rechtsanschaungen, die vor dem Eindringen der
indogermanischen Volker allgemein galten, von diesenfreilich
unterdruckt wlirden, dann aber, aus den unteren Schichten,
in welchen sie sich — dem Blick des Geschichtsforschers
verborgen — behauptet hatten, langsam wieder zur Herrschaft
zu gelangen strebten. Hieraus allein erklart sich die eigen-
thumliche Erscheinung, das schon bei den altesten und
rohesten Volkern Ideen auftreten, wie sie oft bei hoch-gebil-
deten Volkern das Ziel bilden, nach welchem die ganze
Entwickelung strebt. Hieraus erklart sich zugleich auch,
das das Familienrecht von Gortyn schon vor den xii Tafeln
einen moderneren Charakter tragt als das Justinianische
Recht."— Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft.

FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

SOMETHING has already been said about the difficulty of classifying or
grouping the different peoples of pre-classical antiquity, of whom little or
nothing is known except that their historical relationships are with the
elder nations, whose civilization it has been attempted to sketch above.
But whatever the obstacles may be to exact and circumstantial knowledge
respecting the affinities and migrations of the founders of civilization in
Asia Minor, Greece, and the islands and shores ot the Mediterranean, it is
now certain that settlers of some degree of culture were established in
those regions at the remote periods which, half a century ago, were aban-
doned by despairing historians to the mythologist. Some scholars, like
the late eminent historian of Sicily, may resent, not quite unreasonably,
the pretensions of Orientalists, whose most certain data are half hypothesis,
to control or supplement the evidence of classical writers as to the times
before their own ; and the maxim, that one should proceed from the better
to the worse known, has a scientific sound, which tempts us to forget that,
in history as in logic, it is desirable to argue from premisses to a conclusion
rather than conversely. But a generation which begins its classical studies
with a knowledge of the discoveries at Hissarlik, Tiryns, and Mycenae, — with
historical facts of the most material order, upon which virtually no light is
cast by later records, — may be expected to show more tolerance for the
blanks in the knowledge of Egyptian and Assyrian scholars, and to admit
that the later history of all the Mediterranean stocks should be approached
as far as possible by the light of what came before, rather than of what
came after, the rise of Greek and Italian nationalities.

It will be well, therefore, to note the hints and promises of further know-
ledge to come under this head, from the prosecution of archaeological
discovery and the comparative study of institutions, before we pass on to
the third example of primitive domestic civilization in the far east of Asia.
There are two separate lines of evidence, that of archaic monuments and
inscriptions, and that of archaic customary survivals, both of which con-
tribute, in about equal proportions, to instruct and perplex, by the broken
lights they cast upon two separate lines of ethnic movement. And, though
the time has not yet come for any final inferences, perhaps from either set
of data, we may be quite sure that no conclusions in which they are ignored
can be either accurate or complete.

On the one hand, there are still to be found, throughout Northern Africa,
representatives of tribes, once perhaps more numerous, whose language,
has no nearer affinities than to that of the ancient Egyptians; other tribes,

384 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

now speaking Arabic, are ethnologically akin to the former, and resemble
them also in those of their customs which have the same ancestry as the
ancient language ; while the great Phoenician colony in Africa seems in
some ways to have more in common with the Hamitic stocks it found
there than with any parent kingdom in the East. In countries north of the
Mediterranean, on the other hand, the Basques and the Etruscans are con-
nected by their speech with the Georgians, and all three are supposed to
have no nearer linguistic kinship than with the archaic languages of West-
ern Asia, represented to us by the Akkadian, Vannic, and Hittite inscrip-
tions. And scattered between these philological survivals, we find traces
in later custom and tradition of a pre-Hellenic population, which possibly
in language and probably in custom and temperament approached to the
type of pre- Aryan domestic civilization.

The archaic European stocks may be called Alarodian, as the African
kinsmen of the Egyptians may be called Hamitic ; and in art and language,
at all events, if not in race, the one group is more nearly related to primi-
tive Babylonia and the other to ancient Egypt. The pre-Hellenic orproto-
Hellenic civilization of Greece borrowed, but did not inherit, from Egypt ;
and it can scarcely be said that Egypt either borrowed or inherited from
Babylonia, as the Egyptian language is an independent creation, and what-
ever Egypt inherited from Asia must have been acquired before the
divergence of language. But as it is impossible to deny the fact of some
kinship between the dwellers on the Nile and the Euphrates, it is natural
enough that there should be points in common between the minor stocks,
more or less remotely descended from one or other of these founders of
civilization; and a comparative study of these common features may help
to interpret and supplement our fragmentary knowledge of the institutions
of the parent stems.

It will be seen in the following pages that there is no marked line of
distinction between the laws and customs of the Alarodian and the Hamitic
group ; though to aim at explaining the obscure customs of Carthage and
Phoenicia by those of the semi-mythical, pre-Hellenic peoples of the
Mediterranean may seem like a promise to illustrate the Unknown by the
Unknowable. But every new fact of which the record is excavated or
deciphered may contribute to interpret — or to modify the traditional
interpretation of — long familiar texts. Statements and names which had
no significance twenty-five years ago, or even less, may now help to com-
plete the story of the oldest world, whose empires were in their prime,
perhaps, in the ipth century before our era. And by doing so, they will
put the history of Greece and Rome themselves in their proper place, not
at the dawn of civilization, but as a kind of "Middle Antiquity" of the
West, with a culture that is in many respects derivative.

We are apt to think of the Phoenicians more as borrowing or learning
from Egypt and Chaldaea, and as lending or giving lessons to the Greeks,
than as possessing an independent life of their own. Dr. Pietschmann
declares that information respecting the daily life, the laws, morals and

FROM MASSALfA TO MALABAR. 385

marriage customs of the Phoenicians are wanting ; and the regrettable delay
in the completion of Meltzer's History of the Carthaginians, which pro-
mised to deal with this class of subject, is perhaps partly due to a corre-
sponding dearth of satisfactory material. That so much should be thought
and written about a people of whom so little is known is partly owing to
the traces which remain of their widespread and potent influence, but it
may also have been owing in part to the exaggeration of their importance,
which was inevitable while no other pre-Hellenic influence was recognised
in the Mediterranean basin.

Whatever view may be taken as to the primitive cradle of proto-Semitic
or Hamite stocks, the balance of probability seems in favour of a connec-
tion between the Phoenicians, the men of Punt, and the pre-Semitic
monarchies of South Arabia. The expansion of this stock to the south-
west ceased with the occupation of Egypt, Arabia Felix, and the Somali
coast. But an ancient settlement at the head of the Persian Gulf may have
continued to develop and to trade with Arabia and the East, till the pres-
sure of Semitic or Kassite intruders drove the more enterprising of the
non-resistant Puna across the desert to Syria and the western sea, and
the People of the Palm tree became the People of the Purple murex
fishery.1 The "blameless Ethiopian" and his modern kinsman, the
Kabyle or Berber, is of the same family ; and the intense conservatism of
some of these tribes has preserved traits which to some extent supply the
de6ciency of direct intormation respecting Phoenician manners and
customs.

The Phoenicians in time adopted a Semitic form of speech ; but the
Akkadians themselves, or at least such of them as remained in Babylonia,
did as much as this, as, in more recent times, Arabic has been adopted by
various non-Semitic stocks ; and, indeed, in the absence of fuller Phoeni-
cian texts, it is impossible to say to what extent the language may have
retained traces of other than Semitic elements. The records of Phoenician
colonies and Phoenician trade are also the record of a colonizing spirit, as
different from that of the later empire States of the West as from the
stationary, self-contained polities of Egypt and China.

But the Phoenicians are not the only connecting link between the East
and West, between the Old World before and the Old World after alphabets.
Before the Phoenician settlements on the Syrian coast attained to cosmo-
politan importance, independent kingdoms of varying but considerable
extent occupied the ground, between the furthest points under the
influence respectively of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The kings of Mitanni
and the other correspondents of Amenophis III. were powerful enough to
be valued as tributary allies by the greatest kings of Egypt, and powerful

1 So Lepsius, 0om'£, purple=the Phoenician colour ; 0ohn£, the palm=the Phoenician
tree : if, however, <poiv6s be taken simply as the name of a colour, namely blood red,
according to the Egyptian monuments, the Puna are emphatically red-skinned, and it
would be natural enough to translate by such a word the somewhat similar sounding
name by which they called themselves. (Nubische Grammatik mil einer Einleitung iiber
die Volkcr und Sprachen Afrikas, p. 99.)

P.C. C C

386 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

enough to be independent of any lesser ruler ; while the Khita1 met the
forces of Rameses on something like equal terms on the field of battle.
Kadesh, Hamath, Aleppo, and Carchemish mark the important centres of
the empire which ranged between the Orontes and the Euphrates, the
existence of which was first revealed to the modern historian by the
records of its foes.

Unfortunately for us, Hittite independence seems to have been too well
preserved for alien kings to have set up the bi-lingual monuments which
would enable us to interpret the native records. But we are so far better
off than the contemporaries of Herodotus and Alexander, that we do not
give to Sesostris (Rameses) or Sardanapalus (Assurbanipal) credit for the
monuments with inscriptions in Hittite hieroglyphs found in Asia Minor.
We have at present no means of knowing what was the normal frontier of
the kings who had their capital at Kadesh or Carchemish, or what the
political relationship may have been between this original Hittite kingdom,
or any confederacy of Syrian Hittites, and the rulers who set up Hittite
monuments in Cappadocia, Phrygia, Lycaonia, and Lydia. We know only
that the " Syrians," who, according to Herodotus, occupied Pteria in
Cappadocia, and the "White Syrians — whom we" (as Strabo says) "call
Cappadocians" — used Hittite hieroglyphs ; and, like the Hittites of Syria,
had an art of their own, not uninfluenced by, but yet independent of, that
of Egypt and Assyria. But we must conclude that this white Syrian race
had spread over all the districts in which monuments clearly derived from
the Hittite type are to be found ; and, failing any direct evidence or
presumption the other way, we may presume that the manners and customs
of the same districts, as recorded at a later time, will include some traits
inherited from the first dominant stratum of population ; and so give
material which, used with due caution, can scarcely fail to be of value as a
clue to its culture.

At this point, however, rival sources of enigmatical information begin to
overlap, and we find the ground, pre-occupied by Leuco-Syrian scribes and
artists, also claimed in Greek tradition for more or less legendary stocks,
who are further supposed to have forestalled the Hellenes in most of their
western settlements. Niebuhr spoke, nearly a century ago, of the very
name of Pelasgians as hateful to historians because of the wild specula-
tions associated with it ; yet in spite of the sceptical bias thus received,
he found in authentic classical literature alone reasons for believing this
forgotten people to have been " one of the greatest nations of ancient
Europe, who, in the course of their migrations, spread almost as widely as
the Celts."

The uninscribed monuments of primitive Syrian architects — Phoenician,
Hittite, and Cappadocian, their city walls and hill fortresses — have all
the same general character. And modern archaeology agrees with classical

1 The identification of the Khita with the Hittites was agreed on before anything else
was known of the people, either from their own inscriptions, or from Babylonian and
Asyrian records.

FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR. 387

tradition that many of the similar prehistoric remains in Greece are cer-
tainly not Phoenician. In Cyprus, where other traces of Phoenician
influence abound, the presence of some earlier and stronger influence is
demonstrated by the identity of several characters in the Cypriote
syllabary with Hittite hieroglyphs. And the proposal to interpret the
famous Lemnos inscription by the analogy of Etruscan while ascribing it
to Pelasgians, is tantamount to a confession that pre-Hellenic, non-Phoeni-
cian culture in the Mediterranean is of the Alarodian or Leuco-Syrian type.
The archaeological and linguistic evidence on this head can only be alluded
to here, and the scholars who supply it would be the last to regard it
as complete, but it gathers volume with every fresh season's crop of exca-
vations.

It may be objected that, by following early Greek historians in using the
common term Syrian for Phoenicians and Cappadocians, the ethnological
question of their relationship is begged. But the authority may be taken
to indicate a superficial resemblance sufficient to justify the name, without
prejudice to more serious considerations. Assuming the origin of the
Phoenicians to be an open question, the difference between their culture
and that of the Hittites and Cappadocians seems to be such, as the main-
tenance by them of a closer commercial intercourse with Egypt and
Mesopotamia would' suffice to explain. The Phoenicians trade with
Assyrians and Semitized Babylonians. The Cappadocians come in touch
with the outer barbarians of Thrace and Scythia. If they were the first
to open the "Cilician gates," they would also be the main intermediaries
of such traffic as passed through them from the East ; but the varied and
broken character of the peninsula must have kept the land trade within
comparatively narrow limits, and Semitic influence would be proportionately
excluded.

Accordingly, whatever is pre-Hellenic in the culture of the nations of
Asia Minor will be found to retain its archaic character later than the
corresponding element on the mainland or islands of Greece. The ancient
customs and institutions described by Strabo and Ephorus must be as old
as the remains of Boghaz-keui and Euiuk, and go back beyond the earliest
suggestions of historic fact in Homeric tradition.

In the following pages it is proposed, while avoiding controversial
questions, to bring together what little is known on the one hand, of
Syro-Phcenician and Liby-Phcenician economy, in illustration of which a
remarkable body of usage among some of the Dravidian peoples of India
— on the line of ancient Red Sea trade — must be referred to ; and on the
other, those traces of pre-Hellenic custom, which appear to be of Alarodian
origin, and may therefore be illustrated by modern Georgian, Basque, and
Albanian usage. The two streams of colonization have the same direc-
tion and flow during the same period of time ; and if our information were
fuller, it would be desirable to treat each important point of law or custom
separately, showing the places where, as well as the people by whom the
custom is followed. As it is, perhaps the least unsatisfactory way of dealing

388 PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATIONS.

with records that have as many blanks as a damaged cuneiform tablet will
be to consider the Phoenicians as a people carrying such and such customs
with them, and Alarodian custom as something clinging to the dwellers
in certain localities ; but the distinction is merely formal, arising out of the
chapter of historic accident.

CHAPTER I.
THE PHOENICIANS AND CARTHAGE.

IN one passage of the book of Joshua, Canaan is called the land of the
Hittites ; but in the genealogy of the tenth chapter of Genesis, Heth is
only the second son, and Sidon the first-born of Canaan ; and in other
enumerations of the dwellers in the land promised to the Israelites, the
Canaanites are, and the Sidonians are not mentioned, so that the latter
must have been regarded as the Canaanites par excellence, at least after the
decline of the Hittite monarchy. *

Sidon, we are told, means " fishery," and later legends, faithful to the
fact that the settlement derived its greatness from the sea, make one of the
first inhabitants of Sidon the inventor of fishing gear. The commercial
importance of Sidon, as the point of union between the trade of the Eastern
and Western worlds, was subsequent to the development of its fisheries
and maritime trade ; but as soon as these became considerable, the traffic
backwards towards the earlier dwelling-place of the people increased to
the proportions celebrated in historical times. The shortest route from
the valley of the Euphrates to the Mediterranean is that which passes
through Palmyra ; but though this was constantly used for traffic in the
flourishing days of the surrounding country, it was not the first one likely
to be opened. The route from Haran to Hamath, probably crossing the
Euphrates at Thapsacus, like the later caravan track, was used by the
Phoenicians from the earliest times for their trade with Mesopotamia ; and
the early Sidonian stations, which were founded at important junctions,
both for trade and for the defence of the passing merchants, are at least
as likely as not to mark the course taken by the first settlers on the coast.

When our records begin, the people of Phoenicia are cut off from their
supposed kinsmen on the Erythraean Sea by a more or less completely
Semitized empire. But this was not the case when Haran — in Akkadian
Kharran — took its name from the " road " traversed by the merchants of
Southern Babylonia — for whom, no doubt, as for the later Hebrews, to
reach Haran was equivalent to " going into the land of Canaan." The
religious importance retained by Haran in the eyes both of Jews and
Arabs is a proof that it was associated for both with their most ancient
memories, while its name shows it to have been older than both.

1 In the Old Testament, the word Canaanite is habitually used as synonymous with
" merchant," but this use would serve equally well for Phoenicians or Hittites ; cf. Gen.
xxiii. 16 ; the Assyrians used the name Hittite in the same general sense.

389

390 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

The town of Laish, afterwards Dan, was a station south of the " entering
in of Hamath,"1 where the high road from Damascus met that from
Northern Mesopotamia to Tyre and Sidon. Laish,2 Hamath, and Eddana,
on the Euphrates, the exact site of which is uncertain, were the chief of
a series of depots or caravanserais, established in the interest of Phoeni-
cian trade, and were themselves counted among the most ancient Sidonian
colonies.

The difference of temperament between the primitive trading race and
the Semitic monarchies erected over its head is exactly illustrated by the
Hebrew account of how the city of Laish came to be called Dan. " The
people that were therein .... dwelt in security, after the manner of
the Zidonians, quiet and secure ; for there was in the land no power of
restraint, that might put to shame in anything, and they were far from the
Zidonians, and they had no dealings with any man." Such was the report
of this people made by the five men of valour of the tribe of Dan, sent to
spy out the land and search it, and they urged their brethren to enter in
and possess it, for the land was large, and a place where was no want of
anything that is in the earth. So they " came unto Laish, unto a people
quiet and secure, and smote them with the edge of the sword, and they
burnt the city with fire. And there was no deliverer, because it was far
from Zidon, and they had no dealings with any man." 3

Sidon, it seems, might have come to the rescue of her colony had it lain
nearer to her doors; the treasures heaped up by the traffic of the princes
of the sea enabled them to hire other men to fight their battles, and so,
first the Phoenicians, and then Carthage, without altogether losing the
characteristics of their race, escaped the doom which befel, sooner or later,
all the other branches of it, that were not fortified against the assault of
strangers by impassable wastes of sand or ocean. But the native " manner
of the Zidonians " is better represented by the virtues which brought the
little town of Laish to destruction, than by the " Phoenician tales " and
" Phoenician treaties " with which Tyre and Sidon sought in later ages to
defend their commerce against the turbulent races which followed them
into the Midland sea.

The great works of Movers and MM. Perrot and Chipiez4 together
furnish an exhaustive enumeration of the places where the Phoenicians'
influence made itself felt. But their monuments are taciturn, and even
their inscriptions cast little light on the mystery of their life ; while the
comparatively copious tales to their discredit, preserved by tradition, are
open to the suspicion which attaches to the evidence of foes or rivals.
Nearly the only disinterested evidence we have as to the political constitu-
tion of a Punic State is Aristotle's description of the government of

1 Gen. xi. 31.

2 Movers, Die Phonizier, vol. II. pt. ii. p. 160.

3 Judges xviii. 7-29.

4 Die Phonizier, F. C. Movers, 1841-56. History of Art, Georges Perrot and Charles
Chipiez (Eng. tr. by W. Armstrong). Vol. iii. Phoenicia and Cyprus. Vol. iv. Sardinia
and Cappadoda. Vol. v. Phrygia, Lydia, Caria, and Lycia.

THE PHOENICIANS AND CARTHAGE. 391

Carthage, which was most probably modelled on that of the parent
confederacy, and is, therefore, our best clue to the latter.

The greatness of Carthage, like that of Tyre and Sidon, seems of trifling
duration when compared with that of the Egyptian monarchy,, yet it was
sufficient to suggest to Cicero a more favourable estimate of Rome's most
dangerous enemy than her patriots were accustomed to form : a State, he
thought, could scarcely remain so wealthy for even 600 years without
" wisdom and breeding." Aristotle, too, was struck by the immunity from
tyranny and revolution enjoyed by the State of Carthage, and supposed the
fact to be accounted for, partly, by a wise system of State-aided emigration,
and partly by other liberalities, whereby the State retained the affections of
the people, and avoided the deterioration in the character of the democracy
caused by extreme poverty. He commends, apparently, as a Carthaginian
practice, the accumulation of the public revenues, with a view to their
distribution among the poorer classes, in such quantities as may enable
them to purchase a small farm or set themselves up in trade, and adds that
it is " worthy of a generous and sensible nobility to divide the poor amongst
them, and give them the means of going to work."

Aristotle probably acquired most of his information respecting Carthage
from Phoenician sources, and he is not likely to have been misled by merely
superficial resemblances when he compares its government to that of Crete
and Lacedsemon. In the scarcity of other authorities his words are worth
quoting in full. After speaking of the greater tranquillity of Crete, as com-
pared with Sparta, he says : —

"The Carthaginians are also considered to have an excellent form of government,
which differs from that of any other State in several respects, though it is in some very
like the Lacedaemonian. Indeed, all three States — the Lacedaemonian, the Cretan, anil
the Carthaginian — resemble one another, and are very different from any others. Many of
the Carthaginian institutions are excellent. The superiority of their constitution is proved
by the fact that, although containing an element of democracy, it has been lasting; the
Carthaginians have never had any rebellion worth speaking of, and have never been
under the rule of a tyrant. Among the points in which the Carthaginian constitution
resembles the Lacedaemonian are the following : — the common tables of the clubs answer
to the Spartan phiditia, and their magistracy of the 104 to the Ephors; but whereas the
Ephors are any chance persons, the magistrates of the Carthaginians are elected according
to merit — this is an improvement. They have also their kings and their gerusia, or
council of elders, who correspond to the kings and elders of Sparta. Their kings, unlike
the Spartan, are not always of the same family, whatever that may happen to be, but if
there is some distinguished family they are elected out of that, and not appointed by
seniority — this is far better. ... Of the deflections from aristocracy and constitu-
tional government, some incline more to democracy, and some to oligarchy. The kings
and elders, if they are unanimous, may determine whether they will or will not bring a
matter before the people ; but when they are not unanimous, the people may decide
(whether or not the matter shall be brought forward).1 And whatever the kings and
elders bring before the people is not only heard, but also determined by them, and any
one who likes may oppose it ; now this is not permitted in Sparta and Crete. That the
magistracies of five, who have under them many important matters, should be co-opted,
that they should choose the supreme council of 100, and should hold office longer than

1 This may be the sense of the text, though the words might be interpreted as meaning
that the people decide the question which the other estates could not agree to bring before
them. Any way, if they decide the points submitted to their consideration by the Senate
and Suffeti, they must also decide those which come before them in despite of either of
those authorities.

392 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

other magistrates (for they are virtually rulers both before and after they hold office) —
these are oligarchical features ; their being without salary, and not elected by lot, and any
similar points, such as the practice of having all suits tried by the magistrates, and not
some by one class of judges or jurors and some by another, as at Lacedsemon, are
characteristics of aristocracy. The Carthaginian constitution deviates from aristocracy
and inclines to oligarchy, chiefly on a point where popular opinion is on their side . . .
for the Carthaginians choose their magistrates, and particularly the highest of them — their
kings and generals— with an eye both to merit and to wealth. But . . . if you must
have regard to wealth, in order to secure leisure, yet it is §urely a bad thing that the highest
offices, such as those of kings and generals, should be bought." 1

There are several points in this description which are far from clear, but
to modern ideas the Carthaginian government appears more entirely
" constitutional" than the kind of Greek aristocracy which serves Aristotle
as a standard. The Executive has a right of initiative, but not a monopoly ;
if the government will not move, and the people have a decided opinion,
the minority in the executive may appeal to the assembly. The professional
politician or the manufacturer of public opinion was unknown, and the real,
spontaneous, and earnest wish of the people was rightly regarded as
sovereign. Such commands, it was seen, would be issued rarely, or only
under pressure of some strong clear motive, against which it would be vain
to oppose the veto of individuals.

It is only the few who are tempted to active misgovernment or over-
government, and the right of veto should therefore be reserved to the
people on the propositions of the Executive, rather than conversely. The
few may want to do the wrong thing, and the many may not know what
would be the right thing to do, and each class is therefore empowered to
provide, as may be needed, a check or an impulse. But the different
powers of the different classes in the State are not associated with the idea
of their opposite interests. The proposals of the executive may bear upon
all sorts of subjects, and did not practically in Carthage aim at all generally
at the diminution of popular rights, so that the verdict of the popular
assembly served, as the vote of a second chamber is supposed to do, to
secure the expression of a second independent opinion. Evidently the
object of those who framed the constitution was to secure the " Great
Harmony " which the Chinese considered most auspicious — a spontaneous
agreement between all members of the body politic.

The Hamitic parliament abhors the idea of a division, of a mere trial of
numerical strength. It is contrary to the courteous, conciliatory instincts
of the race to impose an unwelcome course of action even upon a minority ;
and the executive must therefore be unanimous2 before submitting any pro-
posal to the people. If the people disapprove, the unanimity ceases, and
the proposition is withdrawn. So far as our information goes, there was
no attempt to prescribe beforehand what subjects the people might discuss,
and which might be decided by the Executive without reference to them.

1 Aristotle's Politics (Jowett's translation), Book ii. n, vi. 5.

2 This demand works very differently in the case of a pacific group of tribal elders or
villagers and of a turbulent feudal nobility, else the liberum veto of the Poles might seem
to be a step in the same direction.

THE PHCENICIANS AND CARTHAGE. 393

In Greek States such points called for regulation because, to borrow a
modern phrase, the classes and the masses were always eager to encroach
upon each other's prerogatives ; but in Carthage, when the Senate declared
war without consulting the people, it does not follow that the people were
averse to the war; the reason might just as easily have been that they
were so notoriously favourable to it that it was needless to go through the
form of consulting them. Aristotle expressly objects that there is no legal
method of dealing with the difficulty if the will of the people comes in
direct collision with that of the rulers ; but, as we have occasion frequently
to note, it is characteristic of the first civilized race not to push matters to
an extremity ; and there is less chance of disturbance where collisions are
avoided by mutual consent than where they are provided against by laws,
which no one is likely to respect in a time of open conflict.

Other authorities do not mention magistracies of five or 104, but refer
frequently to tens and thirties : the number 104 would, however, be easily
made up if, like the three cities of the Sidonian confederacy, Carthage had
a Senate or Council of 100, to whom the Surfed, Aristotle's kings, and two
other officers of some kind were added. The members of the Senate
exercised judicial functions, and the habit of the Carthaginians of allowing
the same person to hold many offices, which Aristotle criticises, is, as we
have seen, strictly in accordance with Egyptian usage ; since in Egypt, as in
China, the " superior man " was considered as naturally capable of discharg-
ing all kinds of commissions. The Suffeti, like the Cosmi of Crete, were
chosen out of any family of eminence; and, if Aristotle was correctly
informed about the mysterious magistracies of five, it is probable that they
also resembled the Cosmi by passing into the Senate when their term of
office had expired. His words seem to imply that the Senate appointed
the officers for the year, who might be senators or not, but that all who had
held office became senators for life. This may be, and would not exclude
the possibility of the Senate being also recruited from the Ten or the Thirty.
who may have had any other sort of representative claim.

The governing class would have lost its popular character altogether if a
senate, consisting exclusively of ex-office-bearers, had the sole right of
appointing future officials, and was free to choose them out of its own body.
One would rather conjecture that the ex-officio members were a minority,
and that the rest of the Senate were also elected for their merits, — as the
great court of the Thirty was in Egypt, — but elected by the local authori-
ties they represented, not co-opted by the central council. There can be
little doubt that in all cases the choice would fall upon the leading mem-
ber in leading families of the clans or corporations, the organization of
which was the real and living feature in the State. How far these clubs or
companionships were local, technical, or hereditary, it is as impossible now
to decide as it is to recover the regulations respecting their common meals ;
but they very probably partook in a measure of all three characters.

Justin speaks of the decem Pcenorum principes, who serve Elissa as
counsellors, both in her flight from Tyre and when she is sought in marri-

394 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

age by an African prince; l and the mention throws a gleam of light upon
the possible position of the " royal Tens," so frequently mentioned in
Egyptian inscriptions of the ancient monarchy. In Carthage, in historical
times, such a Ten were first in the Senate and the State ; 2 and other Phoe-
nician towns were officered in the same way, like Marathus, which, when
threatened by the neighbouring Aradians, sent the " ten first of the Senate "
with the symbols of the patron god of the city to beg for peace.3 Josephus
also refers frequently to the " Ten " of the Senate of Tiberias, where after
the exile, the population was largely Phoenician, and the municipal organi-
zation therefore as likely to have followed native as Roman precedents,
while in Cyprus the influence of Tyre and Sidon shows itself in the persis-
tence of the same institution.

The Thirty at Carthage were the elders of the Senate, and in some way,
which cannot be now ascertained, their authority probably depended on
their representative position. Originally most likely each member of the
Thirty was an hereditary prince, more or less of the Egyptian type, the
" first and great one " of a local clan, or the head of an organized corpora-
tion. In complimentary or diplomatic embassies the full number of elders
was employed : a deputation of thirty senators was sent to attend the festival
of Melkarth at Tyre and to bear the offerings, nominally a tithe, due to the
temples of the parent city from her greatest colony. Thirty ambassadors
were sent to convey the submission of the Carthaginians to Rome, and on
another occasion an embassy of the same number was sent to the Roman
camp, while thirty senators were also despatched with full powers to
mediate in the dispute between Hamilcar and Hanno ; and the selection
of thirty of the noblest Carthaginian prisoners by the insurgent mercen-
aries under Matho, points to the existence of that number of clans or cor-
porations of some kind within the city, who were to be terrorized by the
execution of a victim specially near to each of them.

Sometimes authority was delegated to a group of three officers, each
naturally representing one of the Tens. The senators who accompanied
the Carthaginian generals in their campaigns seem to have been three in
number, or if more numerous, there were three distinguished from the
others. The Senate sent three legates to treat with Regulus, and it may
be taken as certain that the people of Carthage were divided into three
principal as well as into thirty subordinate groups.

The numerous towns or settlements founded by Phoenician colonies,
which bore the name Tripolis, only reproduced, more or less exactly, the
form of the confederation between the kings of Tyre, Sidon, and Ara-
dus ; each of these cities had 100 senators, who sat together to form a
supreme council or court of justice upon matters affecting the interests of
the federation ; 4 each of the three cities was required in the same way to
furnish 100 ships to the united fleet ; and of course whenever the three

1 xviii. 6. 3 Movers, II. i. p. 488 fif.

3 Diod., Frag., Book xxxiv. § 29. 4 Diod., xvi. 8.

THE PHCENICIANS AND CARTHAGE. 395

cities joined together for the foundation of a colony, the threefold division
would be perpetuated, without any tribal element being involved.

Phoenician inscriptions from all parts agree in the frequency of their
allusions to professional guilds or corporations, and the Phoenician inscrip-
tion of Marseilles * speaks of the Suffeti and the Companies as in effect the
governing body of the colony. The guild of the Merchants and Ship-
owners was undoubtedly the most important and richest, and it seems to
have been required to contribute a sort of subsidy to certain colonial settle-
ments, which had to pay rent for their factories, while their existence was
beneficial to the whole body of traders. Such a special levy would be
exceedingly difficult to collect if we regard it as a tax ; and indeed the
Government of Tyre had no means of enforcing contributions from the
merchants of Rome or Delos. That the contributions continued never-
theless to be paid, with such punctuality as to hold the scattered colonies
together, long after their political independence had been destroyed, seems
to show that the race had gone far towards realizing the dream of modern
anarchists, and that taxes were paid by consent rather than imposed by
authority. And it is probable that the central government, while it sub-
sisted, only gave effect to the initiative of the voluntary associations, which
survived unimpaired after its extinction.

The Phoenicians settled in foreign parts formed corporations according
to the towns they came from, in the manner of the Chinese " compatriot
guilds." The privileges of the Sidonians in Athens were restricted to
Sidonian citizens, and the colonial corporations were connected with
similar bodies in the parent city. A letter sent by the Tyrian colony in
Puteoli 2 to the Senate and people of Tyre, — " Queen of ships, the sacred,
inviolable, and autonomous metropolis of Phoenicia," — in the year 174 A.D.
throws valuable light upon the relations between the different colonies
and the extent of their submission to the ancient capital.

The colonists begin by congratulating themselves on the superiority of
their factory to any other in the town, and then proceed to explain that the
Tyrian sojourners there were formerly more numerous and wealthy than at
present, while the expense of keeping up the temples and the religious
sacrifices and services, and the rent of the factory remain undiminished.
They therefore apply for relief to the extentof 250 denarii, the rent paid
for the factory, professing their willingness to meet all other local charges
themselves, and representing that their factory, unlike that of royal Rome,
does not derive any revenue from "shipowners or merchants."3

1 Movers (Phonizische Texte, Pt. 2) attributes this inscription to the 4th cent. B.C. The
conclusion of a treaty between Carthage and Marseilles, regulating each other's limits of
colonization, would not have excluded the existence of a large Phoenician colony in
Marseilles itself ; but subsequently Marseilles attached itself to Rome, and after that, a
decree emanating from Carthage would hardly have been promulgated officially there.

2 Puteoli was sometimes called "little Delos" (Mommsen, Hist., iii. p. 430). At Delos
the Phoenician guild of merchants and shipowners was under the protection of the Tyrian
Herakles (Numismatic Chron., xviii. p. 273), and the isle still retains traces of archaic
domestic custom and marriage law, which may go further back than the Phoenicians :
cf. Thuc., i. 8.

3 Movers, II. iii. p. 124. Corp. Iqscr. Gr. 5853.

396 FROM MASSALIA TO MALAXAR.

When this letter was laid before the Tyrians, some well-informed person
observed that the Roman factory used formerly to pay the rent of the
Puteoli factory, and that if this was not done now, the men of Puteoli
would wish to have their factory merged, for financial purposes, in the
Roman one, they themselves sharing in the receipts and liabilities of both.
The representations of the Puteolan advocate were favourably received,
and the decision of the Senate was given laconically : "It always was so,
let it be so now. This is for the good of the city, let the ancient custom
be maintained." This decision, duly reported by Laches (the son of Primo-
genia and Agathopus),1 himself one of the Tyrian sojourners in Puteoli, was
duly engraved as a witness that " our country granted those in Puteoli a
double station in Puteoli and Rome. This was the end of the matter."

Jt is natural enough that the people, who managed their own affairs
successfully by means of compacts and mutual agreements, should seek to
avoid the risks of war by entering into similar engagements with neighbour-
ing powers. The Phoenicians and the Carthaginians stand almost alone in
the Old World in their reliance on the methods of diplomacy and their use
of treaties, as a substitute for war, not merely a record of the terms on
which peace was concluded. Their preference for such methods may have
been partly based upon the skill derived from experience, in which they
naturally surpassed less literary nations ; and this skill in discerning all the
bearings of a proviso may have had more to do than their bad faith with
the evil repute in which so-called " Phoenician treaties" were held, the ex-
pression having become proverbial for those in which one party gains an
advantage by a calculated ambiguity of language.

It was the custom with the Phoenicians to enter into commercial treaties
with the lesser States upon their lines of traffic, concerning the transit duties
to be levied on merchandise ; and the treaties by which Carthage bound
herself to allow other nations to trade within certain limits, upon the west-
ern seas, are as well known as the famous treaty between the Egyptians
and the Khita. In the first treaty with Rome (B.C. 409) the Carthaginians
undertook not to establish any fortified post in Latium, and the stipulation
shows that such a course might otherwise have been contemplated. So
that, down to this date, Italy was still regarded by the Punic stock in much
the same light as Gaul or Spain, as one of those barbarous lands where
civilized traders might establish garrisons for the protection of their fac-
tories, without going through the form of negotiation.

The second treaty between the Romans and the Carthaginians (B.C. 348)
forbids the former to pirate, trade, or colonize beyond the " fair promontory"
of Mastia and Tarseion. Up to about this date, therefore, we may suppose
that Carthaginian and Phoenician ships had the western coasts of Europe
to themselves. From the first, trade followed colonization — to Cyprus,
Rhodes, Crete, the coasts of Greece, Italy and Africa, Sicily and Spain ;
but the steady advance of the colonial outposts was always conducted with
a view to the interest of the trade already established. The Phoenician

1 Vide post, p. 406.

THE PHCEN1CIANS AND CARTHAGE. 397

settlements in Crete were designed to facilitate the trade with Sicily and
Africa ; while, according to Diodorus, Malta received a Phoenician colony
for the same reason, and was used as a place of refuge for vessels trading
beyond it on the west.

The typical Phoenician colony was only a trading station, inhabited by
dealers, who had not ceased to be counted as citizens of the parent State,
who sent offerings to its temples and probably expected to return there, to
end their days and be buried in the ancestral sepulchre, and who had no
relations except in the way of trade with the natives of alien race around
them. In Phoenicia itself the chief object of public interest was the main-
tenance and extension of foreign trade. The wealth of the country de-
pended on the profits of the merchants, and it was therefore the interest of
the Government to encourage and protect the adventures of the citizens.
Unlike the treasures or curiosities imported by the fleets of royal adven-
turers, Phoenician imports were not intended to be consumed within the
country, but to be exchanged for the most part for other commodities.
The products of all lands were brought to market there, and the market
people, after supplying all their own wants in kind, still had commodities
to sell at a profit to the rest of the world.

The Government did not seek to retain a monopoly of this profit ; on
the contrary, private enterprise seems to have been more untrammelled than
at any time before the present century. But individuals and the State
were agreed in desiring to retain a monopoly of foreign traffic as against
the rest of the world, hence the invention of " Phoenician lies " about the
dangers of the sea, and the real dangers which " Tyrian seas " came to
possess for navigators of any other nation. The mixture of timidity and
arrogance, which led the Egyptians, like the Chinese, to exclude foreigners
from their territory, seems to have been transformed in the case of the
Phoenicians into a not less exclusive jealousy of the presence of rival
traders on their beat. It was " the manner of the Sidonians " to have no
dealings with any man, over and above just so much intercourse as was
necessary for the exchange of commodities.

It was believed that the Phoenicians guarded their settlements against
intrusion by laying waste the adjoining lands and destroying any towns
near their borders, and though this is not credible as a general statement,
since in many cases the trading colony relied on the independent natives
of the surrounding country for its food supply, they certainly endeavoured
to secure their position in some cases by deporting the natives of districts
where they wished to establish permanent colonies ; and it is not im-
possible that isolated factories may have entrenched themselves be-
hind a strip of uncultivated ground, by a calculation like that which led
Chinese emperors to protect their coasts against pirates by similar devasta-
tions.

Phoenician traders were everywhere first in the field, and it was easy for
them to persuade their barbarous customers that foreigners of any other
stock were dangerous and should be treated as enemies. They themselves

398 FROM MASSALfA TO MALABAR.

relied more on stratagem than on open warfare to keep the seas, which
they considered their own, free from other navigators ; but the story of the
captain, who received from the State the full value of his ship and cargo,
as a reward for having lured a rival to destruction, by running his ship upon
the rocks, shows that the Government and the citizens were entirely at one
upon the only grave question of foreign policy.

The merchant princes of Tyre enriched the State by enriching them-
selves individually ; but the State still exercised some collective control over
the national resources. Phoenicia did not grow corn enough to supply the
population with food, and accordingly it was the custom for the king to
direct purchases of grain to be made in foreign parts out of the public
funds. l We have no reason to suppose that the corn so purchased was
intended to be given away; but it is evident that, while the profits of ordin-
ary trade were as high as the wealth of the country and Herodotus' account
of a similar venture indicate, it would scarcely pay the private trader to
import corn except at famine prices. It was not, however, for the interest
of the State that the people should buy food at famine prices while the
treasury was full and corn in Egypt and Palestine abundant ; and therefore
in non-agricultural Phoenicia, as in Egypt and China, it was the business of
the Government to keep always such a stock of corn in its granaries as
should prevent the supply of that necessary from falling short or reaching
an exorbitant price.

Silver and gold, wool and purple, couches inlaid with ivory, Babylonish
garments and carpets, unguents of all sorts, female slaves and musicians,
are indicated by the comic poets as forming part of the typical cargo of
a Phoenician merchantman, the value of which in many cases would reach
a far higher figure than a small ship-owner or captain could command. As a
consequence, a good deal of banking or money-lending business was done
by the wealthy members of the great Corporation of Merchants and Ship-
owners.2 The Phoenicians had an evil reputation with the other nations
of the Mediterranean for sharp practices, and the custom of lending money
at interest was considered, of course wrongly, a Phoenician invention,
though it is possible that they led the way in the general substitution of
loans at interest for the more primitive use of antichretic pledges.

Loans on bottomry, i.e. advances made on the security of the cargo of a
ship putting to sea, are of a peculiarly speculative character, as the risks of
the underwriter or insurance company have to be added to those of the
banker. When these risks were borne by the lender, so that the loss of the
ship and cargo involved the loss of principal and interest, and left the bor-
rower, if bankrupt, at least out of debt, the high rate of interest charged
was not unreasonable, since it was paid by a share of profits which were
also normally high. Agreements in bottomry, by which the lender secured
himself against all risk, were common in Athens, and regarded as particu-

1 The ship and treasure carried off by Elissa were prepared for this purpose. (Scrvius
ad Ain., i. 362.)

2 Movers, II. iii. p. 118.

THE PHCENICIANS AND CARTHAGE. 399

larly hateful in Rome ; but they were prohibited by the maritime law of
Rhodes, l faithful in this respect also to the Hamitic habit of excluding
bargains which are in their nature inequitably injurious to the weaker party
to them.

In the Old Testament, the idea of a merchant is that of a foreigner ; if
calamity befals a trading centre, its inhabitants are expected to scatter
themselves and " return every man to his own people." The trader was
therefore conceived as passing his life not among his own people, and to
such strangers the money-lender was under no special bond of charity.
Any loans they might make would be loans for profit, upon which high
interest could be charged without inhumanity. And it is probable that the
Hebrew prohibition against lending to a brother on usury was not uncon-
nected with this state of things ; the borrowing countryman was probably a
needy agriculturist, and the borrowing foreigner a trader, whose profits
would exceed the highest interest he could be asked to pay. The fellow-
countryman's necessities would as a rule be met by a loan for a short
period, — the interval, at furthest, between seed time and harvest, — and the
native capitalist, supposing him to have money lying idle or waiting for a
lucrative investment, was not considered to make an impossibly heavy
sacrifice in lending a small sum, for a short term, to a poor brother free of
interest.

To the Greeks the name Phoenician seems to have called up the same
sort of association as those which still cling to the name of Jew in circles
which make no boast of tolerance ; and it is probable enough that the
first, like the second, great race of wandering traders was less scrupulous
in its dealings with aliens than compatriots. Insincerity is the common
foible of the timid, and it is certainly from a kind of timidity that Egypt
and China strove so zealously to exclude foreigners from within their
frontiers. Phoenicia had no frontiers save such as the astuteness of her
people might set up for themselves round every fishery, factory, or seaport
whither the love of gain had led them; and hence the impression they give
of living, as it were, on the defensive in a hostile world, which it was their
main object to overreach.

So far as the Punic race may be supposed to have merited its evil repu-
tation, one is tempted to account for the fact by the character of its prin-
cipal staples. All the products of all the countries of the world circulated
in Phoenician merchantmen, but the two most considerable and most pro-
fitable articles of trade in which they dealt were human beings and the
precious metals. The Phoenicians were the slave- dealers and the money-
changers of the Old World. And it is evident that a branch of trade, which
necessarily follows the methods of piracy, is less favourable to the growth
of the social virtues than the cultivation of the ground, the domestication
of animals, or the arts and manufactures by which the products of nature
are applied to new and varied uses. Compared with the trade in slaves,

1 77?^ Public Economy of Athens. A. Boeckh, tr. G. Cornewall Lewis (1842), p. 133.

400 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

that in metals — gold, silver, copper and tin — must seem innocent and
meritorious ; yet the experience of ages seems to show that, somehow or
other, mining is not a moralizing industry. And the people who acted
as intermediaries to the miners and money-changers of the Old World seem
to have caught something of the hardness and the greed belonging to both
those approaches to the sanctuary of Plutus.

Nearly all the silver in common use for trade throughout the East was
brought into the market by the Phoenicians. The silver mines were few
and distant ; the trade was thus a monopoly, worth keeping so by the most
savage treatment of suspected rivals, and, as a monopoly, so lucrative that,
but for the long and costly voyage between Spain and Syria, the merchant
would have seemed to get his profit for nothing. The value of silver for
trade and ornament in Asia was so entirely out of proportion to the money
value of the goods exported in exchange for it that the element of recipro-
city, which is the socially valuable element in commercial dealings, was
practically absent.

The use of silver money, though it did not originate with the Phoeni-
cians, was no doubt promoted by their widespread dealings. The coins
were always of known weight, and standing in a well-known relation to the
bars used for large transactions. Barter was used with the natives of the
metalliferous districts, but the demand for silver as a medium of exchange
in other quarters, swallowed up all the yearly output of the mines, that did
not go to swell the hoards of the kings of Western Asia.

Numerous phrases in the Old Testament illustrate the importance of the
silver trade of the Phoenicians. " The merchant people " and "all they
that bear silver " are mentioned in balanced clauses ;J and " the Canaanite in
the house of the Lord of hosts " 2 carried on the work of a money-changer
for centuries before the Christian era. The Book of Job, to describe the
value and rarity of wisdom, borrows its imagery from the art of those who
find veins of precious stones and metals in the secret places of the earth.
The "wisdom and understanding" of Tyre and Sidon, alluded to so often
by the Hebrew prophets, were evidently conceived to lie in the mastery of
this source of wealth. Sidon was famous in Homer's time for copper or
bronze, and Tyre in Solomon's for bronze (the "brass" of the Authorized
Version); and the Phoenicians retailed the work of all other metallurgists
as well as their own, as they retailed the manufactures of Egypt and
Babylonia, and the gums and spices of Arabia.

Bronze was known in Chaldaea long before the development of Phoenician
trade, and in Egypt there is no reason to connect its introduction with this
trade. The Akkadian hymn to Fire, which speaks of alloying copper with
some other metal, must be earlier than the Phoenician trade in tin from
Britain or even Portugal, but the nature of the alloy referred to can hardly
be ascertained with certainty. Meltzer suggests 3 that the first alloy used
may not have been real tin (plumbum album), but the silver-bearing lead

1 Zephaniah i. n. 2 Zechariah xiv. 21.

3 Geschichte der Karthager, i. p. 16.

THE PHCENICIANS AND CARTHAGE. 401

(stannum). But whenever the Phoenician trade began, the discovery of the
mines and their first working must have been earlier still.

There is nothing surprising in this if we suppose Finnic tribes, skilled in
the use of metals, to have spread continuously from the south and east of
Europe to the far west of Britain. And certainly a race capable of making
and profiting by this discovery would also seek a market for the new metal,
which, passing from hand to hand, would end by finding its way into the
great metal market of Sidon. It is far more probable that Phoenician
merchants set forth deliberately to find an ocean route to the mines reported
to exist in the north-west, than that they should have lighted accidentally
upon the distant coast where the valuable metal was to be had.

Bronze and even iron by themselves do not make a Culturvolk, as in
Africa there are still trading and metal-working tribes that have not
achieved civilization. But the degree of skill and enterprise shown by such
tribes fully warrants us in believing that outside the range of the earliest
civilized States, there were tribes debarred by natural causes from attaining
the same high level unassisted, but yet able to recognise and transport for
extraordinary distances such natural valuables as their own circumstances
made available. Such branches of the primitive Finnic stock as drifted
towards the chill north and central lands of Germany differed only in
external circumstances from their kinsmen who founded the first civilized
States or cities. Civilization is like those half-hardy plants, which will bloom
out of doors in the colder temperate zones, but must be, as the gardeners
say, raised in heat. Civilization implies the making of things, and fewer
tools are required for industry in the warmer regions, where nature makes
material existence so easy and pleasant that the mental energies of the race
are not all preoccupied by the quest for food. But, while things are made
first where it is easiest to make them, the making of tools is itself a
stimulus to invention, when the notion of making has been borrowed from
without. So in the same country where the historic Briton invented the
power-loom, the legendary gnome may have discovered the virtues of tin in
alloying copper into bronze.

Two things are certain with regard to the continental commerce of
Europe before the written history of its northern countries begins. Tin
and amber were conveyed by more than one route x from Cornwall and
the North Sea to Mediterranean ports. In the latter case the traders pro-
ceeded up the Rhine and the Aar, along the Jura to the Rhone, and thence
down to Marseilles ; and also across the Alps, by a track forking off,
perhaps at Grenoble, into the valley of the Po, and so to the Adriatic.
Amber beads have been found in quantities in the tombs at Mycenae, and
the Necropolis of Tharros, in Sardinia, as well as throughout Etruria, so
that the trade was certainly flourishing in prehistoric times. The ancient
kingdom of the Cappadocian Hittites served perhaps to connect the pre-
Persian trade-route from Central Asia to the Black Sea with certain lines of

1 For the discussion of the subject see Elton Origins of English History, and
Ridgeway, Folk Lore, 1890, " The Greek Trade Routes to Britain."

P.C. D D

402 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

traffic and migration indicated by more obscure tradition, and by the
various evidence which has led scholars like Mommsen to hold that the
Etruscans entered Italy from the north.

The trade between north and south must have been in touch with these
movements in Eastern Europe, and in both east and west commercial
intercourse seems to have been relatively more advanced than political
organization. A tradition lingered into historic times of trade routes
through Gaul and Spain, enjoying special security and protection by the
guarantee of the native population. Mr. Ridgeway quotes from the Book
of Wonderful Stories a passage which certainly seems to indicate the
existence of a kind of "truce of commerce," which could hardly be insti-
tuted save by branches of the primitive, pacific, trading race : " They say
that from Italy into Keltike, and the land of the Keltoligyes and Iberians,
there is a certain road called that of Herakles, by which, if any journey,
whether Greek or native, he is protected by those who dwell along it. For
those in whose vicinity the wrong is done have to pay the penalty."1

Apart from the Phoenician sea trade, Cornish tin was conveyed partly by
water to Armorica and to Marseilles through the west of France; but also to
the east of England (partly overland, by the route known later as the
Pilgrims' Way), and from the east of Kent, possibly to the seat of the
amber trade, as well as to a route through the east of France, starting from
the short Dover crossing. Buried hoards of tin and amber have been
discovered along these routes, hidden, no doubt, when the caravan was
attacked by enemies or fell a victim to the natural perils of the road. One
period at which these tin and amber tracks were in regular use is dated for
us before the 3rd century B.C., as imitations of two types of Greek coins
are found, distributed for the most part along these two routes. The
earlier of them is copied from coins of Massalia and Rhoda, and the later,
first struck about 250 B.C.2 by the Arverni, from gold Macedonian staters.
But at that date the roads were already ancient, since there are few more
lasting institutions than a line of traffic ; and amber, we know, made its
way somehow as far as Greece and Sardinia, before Rome or Carthage were
cities. This trade cannot have originated with the Phoenicians, but it was
characteristic of their enterprise that they should have aimed at putting
themselves in direct communication, by sea, with the tin-bearing island, as
soon as the value of the product became known to them.

When we are able to fix the place, in a list of industrial genera and
species, of the fossil remains of archaeology, the merest trifles may become
as eloquent as a new inscription, and we have, no doubt, much still to learn
ot the range of Phoenician trade from such indications. An ingot of tin

1 The Origin of Metallic Currency and Weight Standards, by Prof. W. Ridgeway,
p. 107. The archaic representations of Herakles with the lion's skin are unmistakably
derived from the typical Babylonian group of Gilgames and Hea-bani (Perrot and
Chipiez, iii. 570), and the existence of any such tutelary monument would at once explain
the name of the road, and show its real genealogy ; which is also illustrated by transitional
Cypriote forms.

2 W. Ridgeway, Folk Lore, 1890, p. 99.

THE PHOENICIANS AND CARTHAGE. 403

found in Falmouth harbour exactly resembles the shape of a soapstone
mould found at the Zimbabwe ruins in Mashonaland,1 as well as several
knuckle-bone-like casts found in undoubted Phoenician settlements. And it
is quite possible that we may be able ultimately to distinguish between relics
of Syrian and Syro-Cappadocian traders, as we can already distinguish
between the genuine wares of Egypt and Babylonia and the cheap, inferior
imitations of them made to sell by Phoenician dealers.

Glass-making and dyeing were the only characteristic Phoenician indus-
tries. They copied Egyptian faience badly, but carried the art of inlaying
glass (with patterns in coloured threads), and the manufacture of gold
ornaments, to a higher point of mechanical perfection and delicacy than
their more artistic precursors and successors.2 They may also have
originated the practice of painting on earthenware, of which Greek art was
to make such striking use. The hieroglyphs used in Phoenician decoration
are quite meaningless ; scarabs found in Sardinia, made of native stones,
during the period of Carthaginian rule, mix Egyptian and Chaldaean
motives. Scarabs, bearing Assyrian figures, for use as signets, and the
clumsy imitations of Chaidaean characters, also testify at once to the source
of the trader's inspiration, and to his remoteness from it. The sphinxes
used in Phoenician decoration combine Egyptian and Assyrian types, and
the stock Babylonian motif, of two rampant animals opposed, became a
commonplace of arabesque ornament. Where there is least deliberate
imitation in the figure groups of Phoenician design, a real change in the
costume of the people shows itself, answering to the spread from a hot to a
colder or variable climate, examples being found of clothing in every style,
from Egyptian simplicity to Chaldsean fulness.

The art, like the written character of Cyprus, occupies a singular position.
It appears to be a compromise or cross between the art of Egypt and
Assyria and that of Greece. The costume is Assyrian, but Assyrian
art was only known through Phoenician commerce, while the Greek
tendency was original and spontaneous, and the imitation of Egypt perhaps
direct. Homer regards Cyprus as a Phoenician, copper-working island ;
and in the Odyssey, like Egypt and Phoenicia, it is a very distant country.
Of its three chief pre-Hellenic cities, Kition, Amathus, and Paphos, the
first two remained Phoenician to the latest moment, while Salamis was
always Greek. The advent of Greek settlers has been variously placed
between the gth and the i2th centuries B.C., and one legend places a
Cypriote thalassocracy of thirty-three years in the Qth century.

The Cypriote inscriptions contain about fifty-five signs of syllabic value,
with traces of cuneiform, Hittite, or Lycian influence on the characters,
while the language is an archaic Greek dialect, any way earlier than
the Cadmeian alphabet. But it is a curious problem how the Greeks of
Cyprus, in spite of all other traces of Phoenician influence, should have
retained so much independence as to prefer their archaic inferior character,

1 The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland. J. T. Bent, 1892, p. 182.

2 History of Art, English trans., Hi. p. 728.

404 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

when the rest of Greece had adopted the more modern Phoenician
alphabet.

It is a possible view that the primitive non-Phoenician element in the
population belonged to the pre- or proto-Hellenic stratum, which in Lemnos
retained an archaic language as well as an archaic character ; and may have
been, as it were, at first hand, under the same kind of influence as the
Phoenicians, instead of only deriving its Orientalism from them. Other-
wise we should have to suppose that the Phoenicians introduced the
syllabary to Cyprus when they knew nothing better, and discarded it
themselves in favour of the superior invention when alphabets came in.
They were ready to learn whatever other people could invent, but the more
inventive mixed race is less ready, than the mere middleman, to discard
ideas which it has made its own, in favour of new foreign inventions.
Aphrodite may be only the goddess Istar in disguise, but once established
as the island queen, she is not to be dislodged ; and in Cypriote chapels
peasants still adore the mother of Christ under the name of the " Panagia
Aphroditissa."1

The language and coinage of Malta and Gaulos (the modern Gozzo)
continued Phoenician after both had fallen under Roman dominion ; and
some headless stone figures found ;in the Maltese temple have unfinished,
but enormously fat limbs and trunk, as if the obesity admired by the men
of Punt and some modern Africans had been cultivated there. The
peculiar mannerism of archaic Cypriote and Etruscan, or indeed of archaic
Attic art, a slanting upturn of the eyes following the corners of the half-
smiling mouth, may be taken, according to the aesthetic or ethnological
preoccupations of the student, as showing the artist's vain desire to realize
Leonardo's favourite type of beauty, or to represent a Chinese cast of
feature. In either case the tendency is exaggerated by the lack of technical
skill. Phoenician sarcophagi give representations of Etruscan-like feasts,
with family groups, recumbent at table ; father and mother, for instance,
with a child apiece, and another man ; while sometimes figures of both
sexes are shown dancing round a flute player, or round a cone. 2

The temples of Byblos, said by classical travellers to be most ancient,
are only known from coins,3 but in them a sacred cone was evidently the
chief object of reverence, and the Cypriote coins show a similar use.
At Lixus, a city with very remarkable remains, at one time only second in
importance to Carthage, a cone was found of hard stone, not native to
the country ; and the use of the same emblem at Zimbabwe is one of the
reasons for supposing the settlement there to have belonged to some offshoot
of a related race. Lixus was a citadel to dt-fend a port, with, of course, a
temple thrown in;4 and this is the regular type of Phoenician settlement.
They built nothing magnificent, except quays and harbours, and had but
one style of architecture for tombs, temples, and forts.

1 History of Art, p. 628. 2 Ib., p. 619.

3 Figured I.e., p. 60, and Buried Cities of Mashonaland, p. 127.

4 History of Art, p. 337.

THE PHOENICIANS AND CARTHAGE. 405

The rock tombs of Phoenicia borrow one of the most elaborate of the
Egyptian peculiarities — the long, descending, subterranean gallery, by which
a secret chamber in the deepest recesses of the monument is reached ; but
this feature was not carried to their further colonies, though, curiously
enough, something like it still obtains among the tribes of East Africa.
The earliest Phoenician tombs found in Cyprus (the Necropolis of Alambra),
attributed to the nth century B.C., contained, when opened, what had been
found in no Syrian tombs of equally early date — the bodies in their
original place, without sarcophagi, lying on shelves, cut in the rock. And
the tombs of Idalion, though less ancient than these, still show no trace of
Greek influence, such as was felt in the 6th or yth century. At Carthage
the dead were thrust head foremost into a niche, the niches in separate
tombs varying in number from three to twenty-one. Tharros in Sardinia has
a large Necropolis in the same style, where scarabs and amulets, with a
marked Egyptian character, have been found, with inscriptions that have
been read, but not translated, in minute characters. The jewelry there was
Asiatic in type, and the earliest pottery Cypriote. The models of boats,
found in tombs at Amathus and elsewhere, have a sort of head in front to
carry a conspicuous eye, after the Egyptian and Chinese fashion.1

Fragments of the ancient walls of the cities of Sidon and Aradus are
still in existence, the wall resting on the living rock, which furnishes as it
were the first courses. Ditches for defence were made by excavating the
rock to be used in the building. Work of different dates is often found
side by side ; the earliest of all is probably like the so-called Cyclopean
walls, with no attempt at regularity in the blocks themselves, or the courses
of unmortared masonry. Even where the stones are squared, one of extra
size is allowed to overlap into two or three rows, and the blocks run much
larger than in ordinary Hellenic work. Three blocks near the base of the
Temple of the Sun, at Baalbek, average over twenty yards in length ; in
the temple of Gaulos, which the peasants call Giganteja,2 the stones are
from ten to twenty feet long, one enormous row resting on the ground,
above which are fairly even courses of imperfectly squared smaller stones.
At Hagiar-kini, on the adjoining island of Malta, a temple door is cut in a
monolith; but of real architectural skill, as distinct from mechanical solidity,
there is no sign.

Citadels and outposts were well planned for defence. Banias, a little
town at the north end of the territory of Aradus, defended on two sides by
a stream, was secured on the third by a fortified wall with angles, salients
and recesses in the style cultivated by engineers from the days of Gudea
to Todleben.3 The Phoenician wall of Eryx, at the far west of Sicily,
resembles in its masonry, as well as in the use of double walls and maze-
like passages, the citadel of the Mashonaland gold miners and the walls
of Tiryns and Mycenae. The outer wall is defended by rectangular towers
at short intervals, and the arched gateways are interesting on account of

1 History of Art, pp. 212, 228, 235, 517. 2 Ib., p. 292 ff.

3 Ib., pp. 326, 332.

4o6 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

the various devices used as a substitute for the true arch. At Thapsus, a
Tyrian colony, due west of Malta, on the African coast, there are three
walls, with ditches and casemates, and, according to Appian, the upper
stories, reached by an inclined plane, were used as stables. 1 Subterranean
cisterns provided water for the garrison, and the mole of the harbour was
built with perforated channels to let the force of the waves disperse.

The " pleasant houses " of Tyre, of which Ezekiel speaks,2 have left no
traces ; most private buildings were probably of wood ; but in the three
chief cities of the confederation, the demand for buildings within a narrow
area seems to have raised the price of land, and at Tyre and Aradus
houses were higher than at Rome, while as many as six stories were to be
found in the main streets of Carthage. 3 The immense cisterns of the
latter city, which still remain, were filled with rain-water, collected from
the streets, which were paved and channelled to receive it ; arrangements
were made for filtering and the cisterns walled with concrete to prevent
loss from evaporation, which adds so seriously to the magnitude of irriga-
tion enterprises in Africa. Large open-air cisterns were also provided for
irrigation and the use of animals.

The principle of the Artesian well must have discovered itself, so to
speak, to the Phoenicians, and besides the famous submarine spring of
Tyre, there are remains of interesting waterworks on the mainland, four
or five miles south of the city. A short distance from the shore, some
natural springs of great strength have been enclosed by massive walled
towers, rising nearly twenty feet above the ground, and with a total depth
of eighty or ninety feet, the level of the spring having been raised artifi-
cially for irrigation purposes. 4 The canal which brings the water to Tyre
was clearly not made by the Romans, though the towers have been re-
paired by them.

Very little is known of the domestic and social customs of Phoenicia.
The Sidonian kings protected their tombs with imprecations of the usual
sort, and were sometimes married to their sisters. With regard to family
law, the inscription of Puteoli, previously quoted, seems to point to some
heirship of daughters. It will be remembered that the claims of that
settlement were advocated in the Tyrian senate by Laches, " son of
Preimogeneia (sic) and Agathopus."5 Boeckh comments on the fact of
the mother's name being mentioned first, and asks if it can be a sign of
anything like the Lycian custom having prevailed in Tyre. But when we
take the mother's name itself in conjunction with the precedence given
to it, it seems obvious to conclude that the heirship of the eldest daughter
was known among the Phoenicians, as among the Egyptians and the

1 The best preserved portion of the buildings explored by Mr. Flinders Petrie at
Naukratis is described by him as consisting of a system ot chambers and passages,
" each only accessible at the height of seventeen feet from the ground." (Naukratis, Egypt
Exploration Fund Publications, 1888.)

a xxvi. 12. 3 History of Art, iii. p. 355.

4 /*-, P. 357- 5 Ante, p. 396.

THE PHCENICIANS AND CARTHAGE. 407

Basques, and that descent might be traced and property inherited through
the mother, at all events when the mother was a first-born child.

If this indication may be depended upon, it would be fair to assume
that Phoenician law was in harmony with the archaic elements of the
Syro-Roman code described hereafter, and with modern usages which go
back to similar originals. The only traces of the common meals, which
were a prominent institution in Carthage, are met with among Berber
tribes. And we have more than one testimony to a fundamental sympathy
between the Tyrian and Libyan subjects of the city. The charge said to
have been brought against Hanno, that he made his townsmen Africans
instead of Tyrians, proves that the African towns had a distinct type of
civilization of their own, and that this type had attractions for the Panic
race. But, on the other hand, it was observed, as lately as in the days of
Sallust, that the language alone of the inhabitants of Greater Leptis had
been affected by their intercourse with the Numidians : ( ' leges, cultusque
pleraque Sidonica."1 Yet Leptis was only a tributary town, not one of the
colonies or confederated States which shared both the laws and civil rights
of the mother city.

Little or nothing is known of the rules of inheritance or the position of
women in Carthage. But the Numidians, it is scarcely possible to doubt,
will have shared the most primitive customs still prevailing among the
Hamitic tribes of Africa, by which descent is counted through the mother,
and property transmitted to nephews rather than sons. Libyan custom in
this respect was probably more archaic than Phoenician, and considering
the persistence of related customs even to the present day, one is tempted
to believe that the Liby-Phcenicians are more likely to have adhered to
African than to Tyrian custom where the two differed. And, at the same
time, we are assured that the two did not differ generically ; so that, what-
ever the native African custom may have been, it was not strange or
startling to Phoenicians in the sense, for instance, that Lycian custom was
to the Greeks.

Such general considerations of probability do not carry us far, but there
are one or two other shreds of evidence pointing the same way. De Slane,
in his translation of Ibn Khaldoun's History of the Berbers, observes that
if Mas, which is so common a beginning of African proper names, means
son, as has been supposed, it must mean mother's son, having the same
value as the Etruscan suffix, because divers sons of the same king have
different names beginning with this prefix.2 It has also been noticed that
in Plantus reference to the materfamilias is much commoner than to the
father.3 It is common in Carthaginian and Phoenician genealogies for
grandsons to bear the grandfather's name, but in Numidian, as in Etruscan
bi-lingual inscriptions, the Latin versions omit details which are contained

ha, 78, 4.

2 Histoire des Berbtres et des Dynasties Musulmanes de F Afrique Septentrionale, par
Ibn Khaldoun, tr. de 1'Arabe by M. le baron De Slane (1852), vol. iv. p. 500.

3 Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, p. 9. He cites Hugo, Rechtsgeschichle, v. p. 131, ilth
ed., but I have been unable to verify the reference.

4o8 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

in the other portion,1 and very probably in the one case, as in the other,
the native version gives prominence to the maternal ancestry.

Faidherbe also notices the number of names beginning with Mas? and
observes that in the middle ages the most numerous tribe of the Moghreb
was called Masmouda, and was supposed to be descended from Masmoud,
of the tribe of Masmata, in whose genealogy are five brothers called Beni
Mastcouda after their mother, whose name has the prefix mas, followed by
the feminine sign t.

The use of writing was common in Carthage long before Greece, and
when the city was destroyed, whole libraries of Punic works were found
there, though the Romans, less enlightened in this than the Semitic con-
querors of Babylon and the Tatar kings of China, made no effort to pre-
serve or utilize them ; with the exception of a treatise or two on agriculture
and cattle-farming, subjects as to which the Carthaginians, whose whole
territory was cultivated like a garden, were admitted to be authorities.
The existence of copious records and writings of all kinds is of course
an argument, both in this case and that of the Phoenicians, for the pro-
bable existence of materials 3 which may have been used, at first or
second hand, by later compilers like Justin, as well as by the political
philosophers of Greece ; so that the scattered references to Punic laws and
constitutions which have reached us are probably fairly trustworthy as far
as they go, though miserably meagre compared with what they might have
been, if the countrymen of Scipio had possessed the smallest spark of his-
toric insight or curiosity.

The scraps of Punic in the Poenulus of Plautus may be taken to corre-
spond with the " All right," "Good morning," " Goddam," which mark the
travelling Briton in French comedy ; and it is almost startling to find
in this meagre repertory of phrases a reminiscence of the copy-book
morality of Egyptian epitaphs and Confucian table-talk. The Latin
phrase describing the respectability of Antidamas is not particularly
characteristic: " Eum fecisse aiunt, sibi quod faciendum fuit; " 4 but the
Phoenician original of this is rendered by Movers : "A man of whom people
said that he did everything which a just man ought to do." Here we have
the two characteristic elements in the Egyptian and Chinese standard of
propriety : the idea of the good man, who does what ought to be done, and
the idea of a public — neighbours, fellow-townsmen or fellow-villagers — whose
favourable opinion is looked for and respected, while its expression is taken
as conclusive. The phrase is evidently a stock one, likely to strike
foreigners by its frequent recurrence, or to linger in the memory of one
long absent from his native land ; and we are justified in inferring from it

1 General Faidherbe, Collection complete des Inscriptions Numidiques, 1870, p. 53.

2 Ib. , p. 36.

3 Pliny says that cedar beams in the temple of Apollo, at Utica, remained undecayed
1,178 years after the foundation of the city, implying that the precise date of this event
was on record, (fftst. Nat., xvi. 79, 3.)

4 Phon. Texte. Pcenulus, v. i.

THE PHCENICIANS AND CARTHAGE. 409

that in Carthage, as in Egypt, the opinion of the people was a real social
power.

It will be remembered that the phrase, "a praiseworthy man, praised by
the praiseworthy," is old Egyptian ; and that the ideal of the righteous
man " who loves his town," and " fulfils what it is becoming for him to
do," is also old Akkadian ; 1 and without claiming a monopoly for such
copybook morality on behalf of any race, we may note the tendency in
Plautus to make a catch-word of the corresponding phrase,2 which also
represents the ideal of the Canary islanders, and the highest flight of
Melanesian ethics.3

We may get a clue to the temper of the Carthaginians in yet another
quarter. Varro, Cato, and all the other Roman writers on agriculture and
cattle-farming, refer to the precepts of the Carthaginian Mago,, which Varro
had gone so far as to excerpt at length, that he might read them over at
intervals to his cowman.4 It is curious to contrast the treatment of cows
and oxen, as prescribed by the Carthaginians, with the treatment of the
human livestock recommended by the great Roman citizen, whom Roman
opinion accepted as a typical and admirable Roman. Modern human-
itarianism and modern science have nothing to add to Mago's counsels as
to the breaking in of oxen for the plough, which are just such as are
given nowadays by the most cunningly humane of horse-breakers. The
animals are to be shown everything before it touches them, to be
caressed with the hand before being harnessed, and taught to associate the
presence of the herdsman with the bestowal of tempting food ; a south
exposure, a hard dry floor, with a sufficient slope to procure good drainage,
are all insisted on ; and in general, the success of the Carthaginians in
stock farming seems to have been obtained by the same kindly methods
as those which prevailed among the animal petting and worshipping
Egyptians.

The Roman's agricultural slave had a very different lot. The idea that
it could pay to keep him in good condition or good temper had clearly
not occurred to Cato ; the stewards were valued in proportion to their
energy as slave-drivers, and the unhappy ration-eaters of the Roman land-
owner had an allowance of bread and wine narrowly calculated to keep
them in working order — 4 Ibs. of bread a day in winter, and 5 Ibs.
during the summer months of continuous field labour, while as to clothes a
tunic was to last two years and then be returned to make into patchwork.5
The economic brutality implied in the reduction of the winter rations is
one which we should vainly seek to parallel in all the records of the pri-
mitive domestic civilizations. "Carthaginian soup" (made of oatmeal,
new cheese and honey), for which Cato gives the recipe,6 is far more likely

1 Ante, p. 245, n. I.

2 E.g. Famulus, V. vii. 18. Captivi, II. iii. 28, 80, etc.

3 The Melanesia™, p. 274. " Who was the man of good character and life ? " Ans.
" He was one who lived as he ought to do."

4 De Re Rustica, ii. 5. Columella, vi. i. Palladius Rutilius, iv. 12.

5 De Agri Cultura, §§ 55, 58. 6 lb., § 85.

4io FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

to have represented the ordinary fare of the labourer than the Roman bare
allowance of bread.

The bulk of the people of Carthage were not agriculturists, but towns-
men. Persons of consideration were said to despise retail trade, as the
Chinese do trade in general, and, though the upper classes were allowed
to engage in commerce on a large scale, many of the nobles preferred to
live on their country estates. Some of these might be descendants of the
hereditary princes, chiefs of the clans who divided the lands in the original
settlement ; but besides these large proprietors, there were lands regarded
as State property, and let to cultivators at a normal rent of a quarter
the nett produce.1 Such cultivators were presumably Liby-Phoenicians,
and if they were not required to pay tithe to Carthaginian temples, their
position would not be much inferior to that of the tax-paying peasantry
of Egypt, and certainly far preferable to that of Cato's farmers.

It is impossible to say whether Justin's report of a prohibition against
learning Greek is based upon any real regulations tending to limit or
discourage intercourse with foreigners. But there would be nothing
surprising about the adoption of such measures, in a State which had
some of the qualities common to Egypt and China, along with those de-
rived by inheritance from Phoenicia. When the subject of Phoenician
and Carthaginian religion has been re-handled in accordance with modern
scientific methods, some light will no doubt be cast upon the general
temperament and affinities of both settlements. The Chinaman in Euro-
pean law courts is still supposed to swear upon a broken saucer, but the
antiquity of that custom is still a matter as to which a conscientious scribe
must " leave a blank in the record," so that it would be premature to con-
nect with it the breaking of a plate with a guest friend among the Cartha-
ginians.2 But " the two triads of Hannibal's oath to Philip of Macedon,3
— sun, moon, and earth ; rivers, meadows, and waters," — which may be said
to include the main objects on which Phoenician worship was based,4 take
us back to the naturalistic foundation of all archaic Asiatic worship. That
rivers should be sacred to gods and trees to goddesses seems a late
development, but the reverence for mountains or " high places " and for
meteoric stones is nearly as ancient as the more rational devotion to " the
spirits of the land and the grain."

The use of human sacrifices and the torture of criminals may be
thought fatal to any claim of the Carthaginians or the Punic stock in
general to credit for humanity. Yet there are two possible explanations
of the former trait. If Phoenician religion, as commonly supposed, were
of Semitic origin, it would be a sign of simple cruelty, like that of the
Assyrians, or of diseased asceticism, such as grew up in parts of Asia

1 According to Cato, in the best soil the Latin metayer only had one-eighth or even
one-ninth of the gross produce ; on bad soil the tenant had one-fifth, i.e. just what the
Egyptian peasant paid as rent.

2 Plautus, Peenulu$) v. I.

3 Polyb., vii. 9, 2.

4 Encyclop. Brit., s.v. " Phoenicia."

THE PHOENICIANS AND CARTHAGE. 41 1

Minor. If, however, the Phoenicians belong to an earlier stock, related
to the men who, in prehistoric times, " gave their children to war-horses,"
it would be a mere survival from primitive savagery, such as is at the root
of the rare outbreaks of Chinese brutality, and would not, by itself, be
conclusive to condemn their general temperament.

Any kind of barbarism may be made tolerable by habit, but nations
which have grown up by the constant assimilation of new elements are
further removed from such crudities, because the barbarisms recommended
by habit are different in the case of each element, and are each in turn
rejected by the rest. Phoenicia had no national life, and was always ready
to borrow (especially anything that it could hope to sell again) ; but it did
not assimilate its loans, and hence, while teaching the rising generation
of nations, it remained in itself more essentially unprogressive than Egypt
or China. A secluded nationality, of conservative race, may grow and
develop slowly upon its own lines ; but the scattered members of a con-
servative race, as is seen in the case of the modern Arab and the modern
Jew, have no characteristic progress of their own, and have no genuine
participation in that of the alien nationalities, which they do not cease to
influence.

CHAPTER II.

PREHISTORIC POPULATIONS OF ASIA MINOR, GREECE, AND

ITAL Y.

THE hypothesis which conceives the wanderings of the Phoenicians to
begin at some point east of Egypt and south of Mesopotamia, implies an
antiquity for that people going back beyond the earliest mention of the
Hittites in history. But in Northern Syria the relative precedence of
Hittites and Phoenicians must have been reversed, and, though Sidon
eclipsed Hamath and Carchemish in the eyes of the West, the East con-
tinued, down to the age of Sargon, to use the name Hittite in as wide a
sense almost as that borne subsequently by the term Syrian.

This fact helps to pave the way for the suggestion, based on recent
archaeological discoveries, that most of the ancient kingdoms of Asia
Minor were founded by offshoots from a white Syrian stock of the Hittite
type, and that the direction of the famous Persian " royal road " from
Susa to Sardis was determined by the situation of their capital cities.1

Long before the re-discovery of the place occupied by the Hittites in
the ancient history of Asia, the historians of art in Asia Minor were struck
by the resemblances of scattered monuments for which no common name
or origin could be suggested then. And MM. Perrot and Chipiez are now
disposed to attribute all these monuments to Syro-Cappadocian kings,
ruling over some branch or offshoots of the Hittite people. Professor
Ramsay, on the other hand, argues from the ruder character of the Cap-
padocian sculptures to their greater antiquity, and conjectures that the
kingdom of which Pteria, or the ruined city of Boghaz Keui, was the
capital, may have been in its prime first ; and that dependencies of this
empire grew into the Hittite kingdom, when the power of Pteria declined
in consequence of Phrygian attacks from the west.

The latter theory presents some chronological difficulties, as one set of
considerations date the decline of Pteria about 900 B.C., while another set
carry the national existence of the Hittites back to at least 1500 B.C. or
1600 B.C. At the same time, there is nothing in the known history of the
Syrian Hittites to lead us to credit them with schemes of distant conquest
and aggression on a scale sufficient to carry their arms to the Black Sea
and the Gulf of Smyrna ; and it is true that the rudest sculpture of the
Cappadocian monuments has more the appearance of an early original
effort than a late copy from finished models.

1 Prof. W. M. Ramsay, Historical Geography of Asia Minor, pp. 26-34.

PREHISTORIC POPULATIONS. 413

All the facts would be conciliated by a third hypothesis, which would
also account for the adoption by Persia of the northern trade route by
Pteria to Sardis. The highlands from Elam to the Caucasus, which form
the spine of the country between the four seas, were certainly inhabited,
more or less continuously, by tribes or nations akin to the men of Sumer
and Akkad. The early documents of Babylonia and Assyria naturally
only mention such of these stocks as came in contact with the kingdoms
of Mesopotamia. But the history of Armenia does not begin with the
Assyrian campaigns against its fortress cities, and Kummuh like Van may
have enjoyed a measure of civilization akin to that of Elamites and Kassites,
for as long a period as the people of the Khita. P^xcept when there was a
rich river valley to be plundered at their feet, the mountain races of
ancient Kurdistan had no craving for extended empire. One capital city
sufficed for a kingdom, and the leader, who wanted to found a new State,
had only to follow fresh highland passes to find new valleys and hilltops
on which to plant a new capital. Cappadocia was probably colonized,
and its prehistoric monuments erected, by independent princes of this
type, rather than by any extension of Median, Armenian, or Hittite
conquests.

Any way, the range of historic conjecture is limited practically to three
points, at which the peninsula is accessible from Central Asia. The so-
called Cilician gates, the natural boundary between Cilicia and Cappadocia,
do not supply the most favourable opening for the colonization of the in-
terior from Syria. The passes of the Amanus or Syrian gates only open
the lower country within the Taurus, traversed by the Pyramus and Sarus
and reaching as far as Tarsus ; that city of ancient and possibly of Hittite
origin was so accessible to Syria that when Tyre and Sidon succeeded to
the commercial supremacy of Carchemish, Tarsus also took a Phoenician
colouring. The scarcity of Hittite monuments in Cilicia may be accounted
for in this way, but the explanation would fail if we had to suppose Hittite:
kings of Cilicia, colonizing and building along the northward road, which,,
ultimately, connected Tarsus and' Sinope.1

Commagene, the territory of which Samosata was the natural capital,
may have been included in the Hittite empire, when that was in its prime;
and may have become independent later, as it was when invaded in the
ninth century by Assyria. Hittite remains have been found at Marash, the
road junction presumably corresponding to the Roman Germaniceia. But,
though the Taurus can be passed from thence by two or three routes, and
without much difficulty by the one leading to Arabissus or Albistan, this
track always remained one of secondary importance. It was not the direct
route between two political centres.

The case is quite different with the royal road of the later Persian
empire, which following the course of the Upper Tigris past Diabekr, crosses
the Euphrates at Tomisa, nearly due east of Melitene, where there is a

1 The comparatively late rock monuments of Ibriz are thoroughly Assyrian in style.

414 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

momentary break in the mountain ranges at the junction of the Tokma
with the Euphrates. In later times a road from Samosata to Melitene
skirted the right bank of the Euphrates, but the bold westward course
followed by the royal road, and the fact that Tomisa, on the left bank,
was counted as a Cappadocian fortress, forbid the conjecture that the
Cappadocian part of the road was opened from Commagene.

Whether Central Cappadocia was settled by Hittite, Median, or Armenian
conquest, or by some independent Alarodian migration, it is a simple
fact, established by the labours of modern archaeologists, that the country
was colonized by a people resembling the Hittites in architecture, costume,
and hieroglyphic writing. Further discoveries may throw light on the
question of their origin and starting point, but for the present we may be
content with noting those geographical points, where characteristic monu-
ments, proper names, and institutions are found, in those parts of Asia
Minor which must have been first approached by the eastern land
route.

The exact course of the Persian and Roman roads east of the Cataonian
Comana is still uncertain, but there can be little doubt that both passed
through Comana to Mazaca (Cesarea), which Strabo calls the capital of
the Cappadocian nation. At Mazaca the road is joined by that through
Tyana from Tarsus, which goes due north to Pteria (or Boghaz Keui), and
Sinope. The later Roman road from Ephesus by Laodicea, Apameia
Celaense, and Archelais, which passes south of the central salt desert,
is both more direct and easier than that by Pteria, Ancyra, and Pessinus ;
and the preference of the latter, as Professor Ramsay has shown, can be
best explained by the situation upon it of the ancient city, which the im-
portance of the surrounding monuments prove to have been at some period
the capital of Northern Cappadocia. The bridge by which Croesus crossed
the Halys to attack Pteria is a sure sign of the existence of a great high-
way prior to the first conquests of Persia. But it was a commercial, not
a military highway. Assyria knew nothing of the world beyond the Halys,
and to Assurbanipal himself, as we have seen, Lydia seemed as far off as
the remotest deserts of South Arabia.

Pteria must have been the capital of Cappadocia when the Leuco-Syrian
race was supreme in Asia Minor. Monuments and hieroglyphs testifying
to its presence have been found near Ancyra : — a lion of Hittite type at
Kalaba, and, a few hours to the south-west at Ghiaour kalesi, " the for-
tress of the infidels," both Cyclopean walls and Hittite figures.1 Further
on upon the same road, a pre-Phrygian figure and Hittite inscription were
found by Professor Ramsay in the neighbourhood of the Midas Necropolis.
The same people who built Euiuk and Boghaz Keui doubtless continued
their route beyond Sardis to the Mediterranean, to Cyme and Phocsea on
the one hand and to Ephesus on the other ; the pseudo-Sesostris bas-relief
at Kara-beli and the so-called Niobe of the Sipylus remaining to record

1 History of Art, iv. p. 712 ff. The orientation of the temple at Euiuk is the same as
n Babylonia, the corners facing the cardinal points.

PREHISTORIC POPULATIONS. 415

the fact ; while the historic markets of Gordion and Keramon agora may
also have been open as long as the trade route itself.

West of Tyana and south of the central salt wastes, traces of Hittite or
Syro-Cappadocian work are found as far as Lake Caralis, where remains of
huge walls, and figures carved on the rock, in Hittite costume, but with
something like the Assyrian winged disk overhead,1 show that Lycaonia
had been subject to the same influence as Tarsus. In fact, when the
physical geography of Asia Minor and the lines of modern exploration are
taken together, it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that, wherever
no such monuments have been found, it is either because the nature of
the country did not admit of their erection, or because they have not yet
been looked for.

The central plateau of Asia Minor, exclusive of the salt lakes and desert,
consists of hills and valleys, with alluvial plains and rivers, tending to
become choked at their mouths. It includes about two-thirds of the
whole peninsula ; a portion of the area is steppe, only good for pasturage ;
part is woodless, and part still covered with ancient forests ; in spite of
the thriftless forestry of the Turks, it is still possible to go from Broussa to
Trebizond without leaving the shelter of the woods ; and where woods
give water, the soil is fertile. The two natural architectural products of a
forest-bearing country, the log hut and the chalet, have existed from all
time in Asia Minor ; the modern Yuruk lives in one, and the ancient
Lycian was buried in the other. But the friable rocks in parts of Cappa-
docia also invite cave-dwelling, and many modern villages on the plateau
shelter themselves from the severity of the winter season by building their
huts underground. Phrygian architecture preserves the memory of yet a
third form of primitive dwelling, in the fagades covered with geometric
patterns evidently copied from the native carpets, used as hangings.

The mountainous south coast, facing Crete and Rhodes, is badly
supplied with ports and rivers, which helps to explain the transfer of
maritime enterprise to the islands. Ionia, with its milder climate and less
rugged river valleys, was also more favourably placed for coast traffic,
especially before Miletus and Ephesus had met the fate which now threatens
Smyrna, and were still seaports. Cappadocia, though less favourably
endowed by nature, was civilized first from the east, the order being the
same in space and time ; Hittites or Leuco-Syrians to the right of the
Halys, Phrygians at the source of the Sangarius and the Maeander, and
Lydians on the Lower Hermus appear in history in that succession.

Archaeologists without any bias in favour of pre-Aryan wisdom were the
first to raise the doubt whether Greece did not owe more of her art, archi-
tecture, and religion to Leuco-Syrian influence, than had been hitherto
suspected by historians. MM. Perrot and Chipiez ask whether this con-
nection of Northern Syria and Pteria contributed anything to the art and
thought of Greece, either directly or through the intervention of Lycians,
Carians, Phrygians, and Lydians. And Prof. Ramsay, following a differ-
1 History of Art, p. 723 ff.

416 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

ent train of argument, concludes : " Lydia certainly did not learn religion
from Greece, but Greece probably did from Lydia ; " and avows that "the
conviction has gradually forced itself" upon him that, notwithstanding the
superficial Hellenizing or Latinizing of the speech and culture of the towns,
the mass of the people and the country remained essentially oriental, con-
tinuing to speak their own barbarous tongues, and retaining for centuries,
in spite of their rulers, the primitive names of cities as old as the unde-
ciphered hieroglyphs buried in them.

Where names, language, and religion remained unaltered, it would be
strange indeed if no traces of archaic native usage survived, and, where art
and religion were borrowed, it would be strange too if nothing in the way
of custom or institutions had been transmitted from the earlier race to their
neighbours and conquerors. Without presuming to challenge — what may,
however, be called in question hereafter — the Aryan origin of the Phrygians,
it may be assumed that all which the Greeks supposed themselves to have
borrowed from the Phrygians, was borrowed by the Phrygians from the
ruling race of Cappadocia. And in general, whatever we find common to
the primitive stocks of Asia Minor and the nations of the West, may be re-
garded, failing definite information to the contrary, to be derived by the
West from the East, rather than conversely.

By the light of this rule, Strabo's account of the Mazaceni l acquires a
new significance. He says of them briefly that they " follow the laws of
Charondas, and elect a Nomodist (or Chanter of the Laws), who, like the
Jurisconsults of the Romans, is the interpreter of their laws." What the
real character of the laws of Charondas may have been is no doubt a diffi-
cult question, to which we must return presently, but there were usages in
Southern Italy bearing that traditional name ; and supposing similar usages
to prevail in Cappadocia, an educated native of Pontus, like Strabo, wish-
ing to make the character of the latter clear to the learned world, could
not do so more compendiously than by referring to the well-known name
and code. Only, as it is more reasonable to compare the younger com-
munity with the elder than conversely, Strabo really must be taken to say
that QEnotrian custom, like the prehistoric architecture of Sicily and Sar-
dinia, was Leuco-Syrian in character, which again is virtually equivalent
to claiming for it Alarodian affinities.

The traditional date of the Heracleidse (500 years before Gyges, who is
dated by Assyrian records B.C. 687-653) would coincide with the decline
of the Hittite power, and the contraction of the Cappadocian kingdom
within the Halys when confronted by Phrygians. The Lydian monarchy
itself might have been the result of the isolation, between the Phrygians
and lonians of the coast, of some branch of the Leuco-Syrian stock, grown
into a nationality in contradistinction to those neighbours, though friendly
to the latter in proportion as they were without political organization. The
tradition which in the days of Herodotus attributed the invention of retail
trade to the Lydians 2 is not without significance as to the character of
1 xii. ii. 9. 2 i. 94.

PREHISTORIC POPULATIONS. 417

their civilization ; a trading race of merchants differs from one of shop-
keepers, and that the Lydians should have made themselves remarkable in
the latter direction harmonises with the view that their wealth was due to
the combination of agriculture, industry, and trade, as well as to the gold
washings, which gave a sensational aspect to the rumours concerning its
extent.

It is not as far from Lydia to Etruria as from Mazaca to Rhegium, and
the suggestions of relationship are more numerous and familiar, while the
connection between the prehistoric inhabitants of Greece and the known
races of Asia Minor is closer still. The whole of Greece, or nearly so, was
claimed as having once belonged to one or other of the legendary races.
Ephorus said that Peloponnesus itself was anciently called Pelasgia, and
Strabo does not even think it necessary to quote authorities for the asser-
tion that the whole country called Ionia was formerly inhabited by Carians
and Leleges. The noble families of Ionia intermarried with Lydian, Phry-
gian, or Cauconian kings, and it was at Miletus that the Carian custom of
the separation of the sexes at meals was in force.

The account generally accepted of the migrations of the Pelasgi repre-
sents them as having spread from Asia Minor, via Lemnos, Imbros, and
Samothrace, to Thessaly and the coasts of Southern Italy. The Locrians,
of whom more hereafter, were considered to be Leleges, not Pelasgi, and
some writers speculated as to the identity of the former people with the
Carians. Hesiod makes Locrus the 1 eader of the Leleges, and, what is
still more to the purpose, Aristotle in his lost work on Polities,1 calls the
later Locri Leleges, observing that they occupied Boeotia, while there is
something decidedly matriarchal in the story he tells, apropos of the polity
of the Leucadians, of an original inhabitant named Lelex, who had a
grandson by his daughter ; named Teleboas, besides twenty-two sons bearing
the same name. There is the less reason to hesitate about accepting this
tradition as preserving a real trait de mceurs, as the Locrians, according to
Polybius,2 had a nobility of a Hundred Houses, in which the ancestry was
traced from women. And when the Ozolian Locrians from the Gulf of
Crissa made a settlement (originally) on the Zephyrian promontory, the
modern C. Bruzzano, certain of these women accompanied the colony, and
their descendants were counted noble and called " those of the Hundred
Houses."

Pelasgians are mentioned as having been met with at some time or other
in Lemnos, Imbros, Samothrace, Scyrus, Athos, Metaon in Lesbos, Parion
on the Hellespont, Placia and Scylace on the Propontis, Cyzicus, the
island of Besbicus, Pitane, Antandrus, the coast of Torrhebia, Termerion
in Caria, Malia in Attica, in the region between Mount Hymettus and the
Ilissus, and the promontory of Colias, and in Thebes, besides Pelasgiotis
in Thessaly, and Creston on the Echeidorus, near the Thermaic Gulf. In
Lemnos a pre-Hellenic inscription has been found, which most scholars,
who have attempted to read it, agree must be interpreted by the analogy
1 Strabo, vii. vii. 2. 2 xii. 5.

P.C. E E

4i 8 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

of Etruscan, viewed as a member of the Finno-Ugric family of speech.
And the learned and cautious German who has written a monograph on
the subject 1 believes it to be of Pelasgian origin. It is accompanied by a
profile outline of a warrior with a spear, whose regular but somewhat
stumpy features and bullet head present an almost startling resemblance to
Babylonian busts of the Gudea type.

The alphabet used resembles those of Phocis, Elis, Teos, and Miletus,
and Dr. Pauli thinks the date cannot be earlier than about 650 B.C., which,
as Pelasgian custom will have lasted if anything longer than the language,
leaves ample time for borrowing. Taking the evidence of language only,
there are two suffixes (ss-s and -nd) constantly met with in the names of
places where the Pelasgi-Tyrrhenians are supposed to have passed,,2 and
the names themselves are repeated unchanged, or with trifling variations,
not merely in Thrace and the Troas, Hellas and the JEgean Isles, but in
Lydia, Caria, Cappadocia, Cilicia, and Northern Syria. Strabo enumerates
fourteen different Larissas — a name or word which has always been recog-
nised as Pelasgian — and the termination, which is common in the regions
above enumerated, is rare or unknown elsewhere. The constant repetition
of the same city name is a token of its significance ; Carian and Lycian
personal names resemble those of places, and both are characteristic of
the language. Names of this type cling to the rivers and mountains, which
is a sure sign of antiquity, and they extend more widely than the legends
of Pelasgian origin, while following the same direction, so that the legends
certainly do not exaggerate the diffusion of the stock.

Dr. Pauli thus arrives, from historical and linguistic considerations, at
exactly the same result as that advocated on ethnological grounds by von
Luschau,8 in the official account of the travels in Lycia and Caria, con-
ducted at the expense of the Austrian Government. He considers it is
clearly made out that there was a stratum of population in Western Asia,
to which the Lydians, Carians, and Lycians belonged, which was neither
Semitic nor Indo-German, and he proposes tentatively to connect both the
Pelasgians and the Etruscans with this widespread prehistoric stock — a con-
clusion to which the evidence of archaeology has already been seen to point.
It has been proposed to connect the Sumerian Larsa with the Pelasgian
Larissas, and it is remarkable that the two suffixes already mentioned
•appear also in Kassite and Armenian proper names, the terminal s especi-
ally being almost universal.

A Larissa and Laranda 4 lay only a few miles to the north and south of

1 Eine vor-Griechische Inschrift von Letnnos, C. Pauli.

2 Ilissus, Parnassus, Cadyanda, etc., etc. Cf. also the terminations ita, itta, and etta,
common to Etruria and some parts of Asia Minor (S. Reinach, Bab. and Or. Record, vi.
4, p. 85), to which should probably be added the Etruscan ena, enas (Mommsen, Hist, of
Rome, iv. p. 133), and perhaps the feminine diminutive inna (Ancient Greek Inscriptions
in the British Museum, Pt. IV., Sect. I, DCCCIH.). Cf. also, for geographical and linguistic
traces of Pelasgi, Dr. E. Hesselmeyer, Die Pelasgerfrage tmd ihre Losbarkeit, pp. 5~43-

3 Reisen in Sudwestlichem Klein- Asien. Eugen Petersen und Felix von Luschau, 1889.

4 The association of characteristic names and institutions is too common to be worth
noting, except for an exhaustive statistical comparison. At another Larissa there are five

PREHISTORIC POP ULA TIONS. 4 1 9

Comana on the road to Mazaca, and the persistency of such names is wit-
nessed by the fact that another Laranda, in Lycaonia, is still called so by
the native population, though the official modern name is Karaman. The
Cataonian Comana, situated in a deep and narrow valley of the Anti-Tau-
rus, was the original from which the temple rites and priestly privileges of
the Pontic city of the same name were copied, and it is reasonable to
suppose that the worship figured on the bas-reliefs of lasali kaia and Euiuk
was also of the same character. The inhabitants of the city were
Cataonians, over whom the priest, according to Strabo, exercised con-
current jurisdiction with the king ; while the servants of the temple, num-
bering over 6,000 persons, both men and women, were exclusively subject
to the authority of the priest, who enjoyed the revenue of a large tract
of land adjoining the temple. "He is second in rank in Cappadocia
after the king, and, in general, the priests are descended from the same
family as the kings." 1

The same religion was practised by a population conscious of a kind of
solidarity and continuity in its settlements ; for a temple in Morimene,2
governed and endowed in the same way, though on a scale only half the
size of Comana, was counted as second in dignity to it. But Morimene is
on the west bank of the Halys, between the river^and Lake Tatta, and so
quite off the highway from the south to Pteria. Its two frontier towns
bear the characteristic names Parnassus and Soandus, and the district
would be naturally opened either from Tarsus and Tyana on the south or
Mazaca on the east. A main road from Parnassus to Ancyra rejoins the
" Royal Road," and it is possible that, if the kingdom of Pteria concen-
trated itself within the Halys, the Leuco-Syrian monuments west of that
river may have been the work of a branch passing north-west from Comana
and Morimene to Pessinus. Any way, the characteristics of Pessinus are
derived from the pre-Phrygian inhabitants. It was an important centre of
trade as well as of the worship of the mother of the gods, venerated under
the native name of Agdistis ; and here also the tradition of the ancient
sovereignty of the priesthood, and the memory of their vast endowments
lingered late.

Similar traces of ancient priestly wealth and sovereignty are recognised
in the neighbourhood of Tyana, famous under Imperial Rome for a sacred
spring, and as a great centre for horse-breeding, of which Professor Ram-
say writes : " There is every probability that the breeding of these horses
belonged to the priests of Zeus Asmabaios or Asbamaios at an early time,
and that the property and the trade was inherited from them by the Cap-
padocian kings and the Roman emperors. Prof. Sayce informs me that

eponymous tagi. The town of Kus in Caria, built on a scarped height, has a temple of
Hekate, which possesses the right of asylum. Alabanda is famed for luxury and singing
girls. The ancient temple of Zeus at Labranda "belongs peculiarly to the city " (Strabo,
xiv. ii. 23). The office of priest is held for life by the most distinguished citizens, and a
paved road, called the Sacred Way, sixty stadia long, leads from the city to the moun-

tain village where the temple stood.

1 xii. ii. 3. 2 /£., §6.

420 FROM MASS ALIA TO MALABAR.

some of the clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters, which I pur-
chased from a dealer in Kaisari, relate to the sale of horses." 1

The archaeology of Leuco-Syrian religion would no doubt repay minute
and disinterested investigation as richly as the kindred field of art, but to
bring together an enormous mass of intrinsically uninteresting material
from several distinct and difficult regions of research is a work which few
are willing to take without the stimulus of a disqualifying bias. The
worship of trees, of high places, of "angels" or tutelary spirits was widely
diffused, and all seem to have been associated with traits that point to
primitive Babylonian rather than specially Semitic precedents. A sacred
grove at Tavium, a fort and market place between Pteria and the Halys,
was used " as a place of refuge " as late as Strabo's time ; the worship of
angels, against which St. Paul warns the Colossians, was tinged with idola-
trous associations till the 6th cent. A.D. or later, and the character of the
idolatry suspected may be inferred from the inscription of Miletus, in
which the archangels of the seven planets are invoked to protect the city.*

It is vain to wish now for the light which adepts duly initiated in the
Greek mysteries would undoubtedly have been able to throw upon the
conceptions of their Phrygian or Cappadocian teachers. But it is not
absolutely impossible that by some lucky chance faint hints may yet become
available from the opposite quarter to assist the speculations of modern
scholarship. The view that the teaching of the mysteries was directed
towards a sort of meditative realization of the story of Demeter and
Persephone,3 with cosmic or ethical applications a discretion, may be con-
firmed by further knowledge, for instance, of the meaning of obscure
Egyptian texts; not, of course, because of the mysteries having been
imparted, as so much ready-made wisdom, from Egypt, but because the.
esoteric doctrine of learned priests in the pre-alphabetic world may have
spread as widely as the habit of allowing slaves or suppliants to take sanc-
tuary with the god, or that of endowing priests to carry on the worship of
the gods at their own expense.

In China the most transcendental religious duty clearly imposed by the
sacred texts is the duty of a pious king to meditate after his accession upon
the virtues of his father or great ancestor, and to realize, as vividly as possible,
the image of his living being.4 Curiously enough, the only body of Chris-
tian missionaries, who have established a really firm footing among the
Chinese, are the followers of the Spanish, or perhaps rather Basque, author
of the " Spiritual Exercises," the method of which is exactly to cultivate
the art of realizing, with the clearness and impressiveness of material vision,
all the incidents of the New Testament narrative. Such psychological

1 Historical Geography of Asia Minor, 1890, p. 449. The tablets in question, there
was reason to believe, had been found in the neighbourhood of Tyana. The latest " re-
vival" of archaic religiosity at Venasa is also curious. /£., p. 292. Church in the Roman
Empire, p. 456.

2 Church in the Roman Empire, p. 480 ; C.I.G., 2895.

8 New Chapters in Greek History, by Percy Gardner, 1892, p. 392.
4 Li-Ki, xxi. ii. 2, 3, 4 ; Sacred Books of the East, v. xxviii. p. 211.

PREHISTORIC POPULATIONS. 421

coincidences are as well worth noting as details about the structure of the
hair, or the colour of the eyes in different races, and they cannot mislead
if no unduly wide inferences are drawn from them ; while they may yet
come in useful, — it is impossible to predict when or how, — -if securely
pigeon-holed in the commonplace book of science.

Direct information about the political constitution of Leuco-Syrian States
is scantier in proportion than that concerning their religion, but the use
of the number three in tribal divisions, joined with decimal, or more rarely
duodecimal classifications, appears common to the Leuco-Syrians with the
Phoenicians, so that the question arises whether its frequency among later
Greek and Italian settlements is not to be accounted for by another
instance of borrowing from the earlier colonists of the Mediterranean
basin. The very word tribe itself is a witness to the great antiquity of a
threefold division of the community, since the Romans, from whom we
borrow it, came to use the word for a third part, or dividing into three, in
the general sense of a part or division.

Mommsen himself raises the question, " whether a triple division of the
community was not a fundamental principle of the Graeco-Italians ; " 1 and
only hesitates to answer it in the affirmative, because the classification is
common rather than universal among these stocks. But it is general if
not universal among the preceding generation of settlers, so that the most
natural explanation of its frequency among the Graeco-Italians would be
their having borrowed it ; and its presence in any district would be an
indication of the preponderant influence exercised there at some period by
the earlier race.

In the Doric States there were three tribes divided into ten phratries.
In Sparta each Phyle had ten chiefs, or phratriarchs, thirty in all, repre-
sented by twenty-eight elders and two kings ; in Crete there were ten cosmi,
one for each phratry, who, with the elders, formed the senate. In Athens
the four tribes were each divided into three phratrise, and these again into
thirty gentes. Besides the Greeks, the Cretans and Rhodians, the Lycians,
Carians and Galatians had the same threefold division. The duodecimal
division, originating with Babylonia, was commonest with the Aramaic
stock ; it recurs, however, whenever towns or districts are divided into four
quarters,2 to which there is also a standing tendency ; and it is met with
in Etruria, where the metric system was duodecimal.3

Legend divides Attica into twelve poleis, which would give four triads,
but this is not more historical than the twelve cities of Etruria. The
tetrakomoi and trikomoi of historic Attica represent a primitive grouping
of villages ; the latter is found in the valley of Cephissus, a river name of
Pelasgic type, and met with also in Phocis, Bceotia, Salamis, Sicyonia, etc.

1 Hist, of Rome, Eng. trans. (1868), vol. i. p. 46 n.

2 The city of Thurium, founded by exiles from Sybaris, had four divisions or streets,
crossed by three streets, dividing the whole into twelve sections.

3 Busolt points out that the nine archons and fifty-one epheti at Athens together
form a body of sixty, double the great council of Sparta ; but sexagesimal divisions
suggest still remoter parallels.

422 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

The Triphylia in Elis again is associated with Cyparissia, and, according
to Herodotus, with a primitive Cauconian population. Orchomenus,
famous for its Cyclopean remains and mural decoration of Egyptian pattern,
is situated on the Boeotian Cephissus, above Lake Cephissus or Copais,,
where there are remains of subterranean channels,1 representing a skill and
experience in irrigation works beyond anything that can be ascribed to the
Greeks of Homer or Hesiod.

The Galatians, already mentioned as sharing the common threefold
division, were further divided into tetrarchies with separate military and
judicial officers. The council of the twelve tetrarchs consisted of 300
persons,2 who had jurisdiction in all capital causes, those of minor import-
ance being decided by the tetrarchs and the judges. The Soanes, one of
the wildest of the Caucasian tribes,3 was also governed by a king and a
council of 300. This system of government by representative councils,
which prevailed also among the Berbers in Africa, was never fully adopted
by the Greeks, among whom, indeed, it is scarcely possible to conceive the
endurance for centuries of such a bond as that between Tyre, Sidon and
Aradus, or the Lycian and the Etruscan towns.

The Amphictyonic body is said to have included originally twelve cities,
and considering its associations with the temple of Delphi, — which, like
the oracle of Dodona, goes back to the period of Pelasgic ascendency in
Epirus and Boeotia, — it appears probable that the Greeks may, after all,
only have inherited and adapted to their own ends a sort of sacred league
or covenant, which existed before their arrival. As Grote observes, the

1 Leake's description of the citadel on the west, and the katabothrn or subterranean
water-course on the east of the marsh or lake is still the clearest, and brings into the
strongest relief the points of resemblance between the archaic remains of Orchomenus and
those, not only of Asia Minor, but of South Arabia. The hilltop is enclosed by a city
wall, outside of which is the so-called Treasury. But the highest part of the hill, instead
of being enclosed, to form an Acropolis, in the usual Greek fashion, had "only a small
castle on the summit, having a long, narrow approach to it from the body of the town,
between walls which, for the last 200 yards, are almost parallel, and not more than
twenty or thirty yards asunder. . . . The access to the castle from the city was first
by an oblique flight of forty-four steps, six feet wide and cut out of the rock ; and then
by a direct flight of fifty steps of the same kind." {Travels in Northern Greece, ii. pp.
146,7.)

Still more characteristic is the series of shafts (of which Leake counted sixteen), by
which the underground channel of the river was reached (id,, 280-294), so that its course
could be kept free from obstruction. He estimated the length of the subterranean passage
at only half the thirty stades described by Strabo, but even for that distance it is improb-
able that a purely natural channel should have been open continuously, but to improve
and keep it cleared would be an easy task for any people who had a tradition of artificial
irrigation canals, reached in the same way and carried underground to avoid loss from
evaporation under a burning sun. Cf. Yule's Marco Polo, i. p. 1 16 ; post, p. 527 and App. F.

2 An archaic inscription of Tegea mentions a magistracy of 300 in that Arcadian town.
(Bulletin de Cor. Hellenique, 1889, p. 281 ff,)

3 Their descendants, ihe Suanes, or the people of Suanetia, still enjoy the same reputa-
tion, and modern travellers dilate on their savagery, and thievish and murderous proclivi-
ties. Yet even among them a latent aptitude for self'government may linger still ; at
least, Mr. Freshfield and his friends were startled by being asked by their guides, each of
whom had at least half a dozen homicides to answer for, what they considered the best
form of government. These political philosophers had never heard of England, but they
were much tickled by the British response, that it was certainly a bad form of govern-
ment which allowed one village to steal cattle from the next.

PREHISTORIC POPULATIONS. 423

Delphic oracle was consulted by Lydians, Phrygians, and Italians as well
as Greeks, and its fame was established before Hellas was in a position to
impose its fashions on other countries. Ephorus, who probably represents
the Pelasgiotic tradition, seems to have looked upon the oracle as the first
source and centre of civil wisdom, and therefore as coeval with the civilized
settlements before the Hellenes.

The priestesses of Dodona seem to have exercised some kind of judicial
authority, and the story of a quarrel between the Pelasgians and the Boeo-
tians, preserved by Ephorus, like that of the disfranchisement of the Athen-
ian women,1 very possibly preserves the memory of a real contest between
the two races, in the elder of which women possessed civil and political
rights not accorded them in the other. The Boeotians had been told by
the oracle that they would prosper in the war by committing an act of
impiety, upon which they slew the prophetess, meaning thus to comply
with the oracle, if it were genuine, and to punish her if it was deceitfully
intended to tempt them to the guilt of sacrilege. The murderer was tried
by the surviving prophetesses, but the Bcaotians objected to a tribunal of
women, so an equal number of men were appointed, who voted for
acquittal, overruling the women who condemned*

The story of the Athenians tells how, in the reign of Cecrops, the olive
and a spring of water came out of the ground at Athens ; the oracle,
when consulted, declared which divinity each of the gifts proceeded from
and was sacred to, and an assembly of the whole people was called to
choose which should be the patron of the State. The men voted unani-
mously for Neptune and the spring of water ; the women for Minerva and
the olive — and the women were more numerous by one and carried the
day. Neptune in his wrath overflowed the land, and to appease him, the
women were disfranchised, and children ceased to be known as formerly,
by their mother's name. The absence of any reference to this legend in
the plays in which Aristophanes satirizes the pretensions of women is an
argument against its popularity in historical times. But its existence can
only be explained either by the presence in Attica of a pre^Hellenic popu-
lation, with Lycian usages, or by the hypothesis of a matriarchal stage in
the development of the Greek race.2

The Amphictyonic body included some of the tributary or subject tribes
of Thessaly, whose position resembled that of the Perioeci of Lacedsemon,

1 Told by St. Augustine after Varro. De Civ. Dei, xviii. 9.

2 Professor Ramsay's remarks on this subject (Trans. Ninth Or. Cong^ ii. p. 389) are
much to the purpose. ' ' Most of the best attested and least dubious cases of M\ttterrecht
in Ancient History belong to Asia Minor ; and it has always appeared to me that the
sporadic examples which can be detected among the Greek races are alien to the Aryan
type, and are due to intermixture of custom and perhaps of blood, from a non-Aryan
stock whose centre seems to be in Asia Minor ; others, who to me are 0/Xot #j/5/>es, differ
on this point, and regard as a universal stage in human development what I look on as
a special characteristic of certain races." At any rate, it will hardly be said that all
mankind has passed through a stage in which mortgages are uniformly "Welsh," or the
eldest child always joint owner with the parents of the patrimony, institutions which are
now seen to be about as widespread as the polygamy of women and the custom of tracing
descent through the mother.

424 FROM MASS ALIA TO MALABAR.

usually considered to represent the subjugated survivors from a former race
of occupiers, and this fact by itself gives a presumption in favour of the
antiquity and pre-Hellenic character of the institution. Every Amphic-
tyonic State was required to keep the roads and bridges within its territory
in repair, and it is possible that the " sacred road " owed part of its sanctity
in the first instance to its function of keeping the country open for other
purposes than religious worship. The roads leading from Sybaris to the
Tyrrhenian Sea were protected in the interest of traffic only, to enable the
wares brought by the friendly Milesians to reach Etruria overland, and
between Haran and Iberia there are other examples of the tendency to
regard high roads as sacred in themselves.

Councils of Six Hundred are not so common as those of Three Hundred,
but there are two notable examples of them. Marseilles was governed by
a council of 600 timuchi^ or persons having honour and esteem, of whom
fifteen formed a presiding executive, three of whom again had the chief
authority,, while one of the three took precedence of the rest. And a
similar government by Six Hundreds prevailed in Malabar, where it was
undoubtedly connected with the archaic sexagesimal notation, even if not
with the Babylonian " chiefs of the Six Hundred of the country."

So far as the Romans are concerned, it is highly probable that the names
of the three ancient tribes (Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres) were of
Etruscan origin, as an Etruscan writer quoted by Varro states.1 The
threefold division answers to no living reality in Roman history, while it
was reproduced in every Etruscan town, each of which had always three
gates and three sanctuaries. Mantua, which remained Etruscan to a late
period, had three tribes and twelve curise, each of the latter under the
presidency of a Lucumo, a half-priestly, half-princely chief, of whom
twelve in all, like the Twelve Pastors of China and Babylonia, were regarded
as " kings " of the allied people. The Romans also speak constantly of
the Etruscan federation of " Twelve " cities, though the figure is purely
conventional, as the number of cities in the League fluctuated and
generally exceeded that limit.2

These numerical coincidences would not perhaps be of much weight by
themselves, but they are generally associated with one or other of the more
distinctive institutions of the early Hamitic and Alarodian civilizations :
care for the preservation and commemoration of the dead ; common
meals ; the heirship of daughters ; the election of rulers and their control
by public opinion ; or the combination of royal and priestly functions,
either in the same hands or in the hands of associated rulers, together
with minor particularities of civil and domestic law which the reader will
readily recognise as they recur.

1 O. Miiller and his editor are disposed to see in this an indication of a former period
of Etruscan dominion, the Servian constitution representing a reaction against this.
(Die Etrusker, ed. Deecke, vol. i. p. 355.)

2 Strabo mentions an independent tradition according to which the Tyrrhenians
founded twelve cities in Campania after they had been driven from the Po, before being
again dispossessed by the Samnites.

CHAPTER III.
THE ETRUSCANS, LYC1ANS, AND RHODIANS.

THERE will be little difference of opinion as to the place of the Etruscans,
the Lycians, and the Iberians of Spain and the Caucasus in a sketch of
pre-Hellenic custom ; and as to the less well-known nations of Asia Minor,
Hellenic influence is not taken for granted without positive evidence.
The case is different if we venture to suggest that the settlements in
Greece and Italy, which were most famous for their laws and customs, may
have inherited the latter from the same pre-Hellenic population ; and that,
in fact, the laws ascribed to Charondas, Lycurgus, and Minos were not
originally promulgated in Greek ; or that the seven sages of proverbial
fame may have been mainly of barbarian parentage. It will be prudent to
stop short at the contention that the legendary law-givers were admired by
the Greeks of history, as men admire exotic rather than home-grown
wisdom ; and that much which was strange to the average Greek would
have appeared natural and matter of course to the earlier stock.

§ i. THE ETRUSCANS.

With regard to the origin of the Etruscans, the received view of the
ancients from Herodotus to Strabo, makes them an offshoot from the
Lydian people, and therefore, at one time, natives of Asia Minor.
" Lydian " and " Etruscan " were used almost as convertible terms to
describe the luxurious garments used and sold in Etruria ; and the general
acceptance of, what Mommsen calls, " one of the most unhappy compli-
cations of historical tradition/' must have been favoured by general
superficial likeness between the later culture of the two regions. On the
other hand, no theory of the origin of the Etruscans can be really accept-
able which does not account for their possession of a most unplaceable
form of speech, a singularly isolated member of an almost unknown family.

Interpretations of Etruscan have hitherto had nearly as bad a name as
discourse about Pelasgians, but the recent discovery of a long text (of
1,200 words) on the linen wraps of a mummy,1 supplies materials of which
modern scholarship will doubtless avail itself successfully. The text

1 It was brought from Egypt in 1848, and the characters have been more or less
cursorily inspected by Brugsch and others in the interval, but it has only recently been
read and printed. Die Etruskischen Mumienbinden des Agramen National Museum.
Krall. Denkschriften d. Kais. Ak. d. Wiss., vol. 41. Vienna, 1892.

426 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

contains several formulae where the same words recur with a difference, so
that the contribution from it may be of more importance grammatically
than lexically. It contains various additional numerals, and from the
position of these in the repeated phrases, the learned editor conjectures
the text to contain a piece of sacrificial ritual.

Before this important addition to the Etruscan vocabulary, the weight of
authority was tending to the belief in the Finno-Ugric affinities of the
language. And the affinities of the people will be the same, whether they
are supposed to have reached Etruria by sea or land. The trade route
believed to have run from the Black Sea, up the course of the Danube and
on to the Adriatic, must have been opened when the stream of Pelasgian
migration was in full force, and there is no reason why it should not have
been followed by the ancestors of the Etruscans on their way to the Tyrol,
supposing them to have entered Italy that way, or by the Rhaetian Alps,
as Mommsen is inclined to think.

Festus speaks of the Rituales Etruscorum libri in terms implying that
we have lost in them something analogous at once to the "Rites of Chow"
and the ancient law books of the Iberians. They described the founding
of cities, the dividing of the people, and all the ordinances relating to
peace and war, together with the methods of divination, and solemn forms
adopted from them by the Romans in their public ceremonies.

The constitution of the confederacy and the mode of life of the Etrus-
cans approach in many respects to the Syrian type. Commerce and
agriculture alike flourished under the protection of the confederate towns,
and after they had abandoned piracy and even ceased to push their trade
aggressively abroad, they still found means, by developing the internal
trade of Central Italy, to provide themselves with luxuries and wealth. In
irrigation and the " regulation of the waters/' even of that very trouble-
some stream the Po, they were eminently successful ; by a daring calcula-
tion, they led the unmanageable surplus waters through canals into lagoons
to the south, which they trusted in time to see converted into solid land,
by the deposits, which, if undiverted, would have obstructed the river
mouth, and so turned a thriving seaport into a decaying inland village.
They were expert in the art of finding water, and the invention of the
arch and the construction of the Cloaca Maxima at Rome have also been
claimed for them.

Like the Lycians and the Egyptians, the Etruscans were great tomb-
builders, and, like them, built their tombs more or less upon the model of
a dwelling--house, and decorated them with family portraits and domestic
scenes. In spite of the decorations borrowed from Greek mythology, it
is evident from the tombs that the worship of ancestors took precedence
in Etruria of the worship of the gods, The funeral inscriptions of the
Etruscans resembled those of the Lycians and Egyptians in other impor-
tant particulars. Sometimes the father and mother of the deceased are
both named, but most frequently only one parent, and then it is always
the mother. In bi-lingual inscriptions, where the Latin gives both parents'

THE ETRUSCANS, LYCIANS, AND RHODIANS. 427

names, the Etruscan often omits the father,1 and it is very plausibly con-
jectured that the suffixes given to the names of the deceased and his
mother in these inscriptions should be rendered literally by the Egyptian
formula : "So and so, born of such a one,"2 the lady of such a man or
house. As in Lycia, the monuments of women are numerous ; husband
and wife are represented side by side, both in life and death ; and we know
also, from the scandalized expressions of Latin writers, that it was usual
for women to take part in family feasts.

The precise position of the eldest son is not clear. Miiller suggests
that Lars was the title or proper name of the first-born, as a means of
accounting for its frequency, and it is certain that the eldest son was
regarded as the representative of the whole family.

Etruscans of the most distinguished families only bore two names— a
personal and a family or surname ; but such of them as settled in Rome
naturally desired to follow the fashions of that city, and accordingly pro-
vided themselves with a nomen and cognomen by uniting the family
names of their father and mother. But even here the character of the
national usage reveals itself; the surname, as we should say, is taken from
the distaff side, and it is by his mother's family name that the friend of
Horace and Augustus is still familiarly known. The Etruscan Cvelne
Maecnatial latinized his name into Cilnius after his father, and Maecaenas
after his mother, both of whom boasted descent from the commanders of
legions. And it is evident from such a use of the metronymic that the
Lycian use must have prevailed in Etruria. Pride of race and a taste for
long pedigrees seem to have been a general characteristic of the people,
judging from Persius' warning to a youth, not to boast too much of being
able to track his ancestry to the thousandth branch on the Etruscan
genealogical tree.

§ 2. LYCIA.

The Lydian monuments bearing the signature of Syro-Cappadocian
artists are the strongest evidence as to the presence of a corresponding
element in the population. In the case of Lycia, the inscribed monuments
are comparatively late ; archaic -lions and a group of man and lion, ap-
proaching the stock Babylonian type, have been found at Xanthus, but the
remains of archaic institutions are more abundant in proportion than those
of archaic art. The Alpine character of the country affected its customs
as well as its architecture. Besides the well-known stone tombs in which
the beams of the original timber structures are copied, a bas-relief giving
the view of a fortified town, with stone walls and towers, shows that the
dwellings within it were timbered like so many Swiss chalets. Like the
Basque villages, those of Lycia have summer pasturages on the hills, to
which great part of the population resort during the summer months, and

1 Cf. ante, p. 407.

2 Cf. ante, p. 112. " EnJ "ante par . . . ."

428 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

it has been suggested l that the silence of the oracle of Apollo at Patara
for half the year and the absence of eighty families at a time from Xanthus
were owing to this custom. The Lycian college of diviners at Telmessus
also had an ancient, wide-spread, and lasting celebrity.

In connection with the question of the diffusion of customs of the
Lycian type, it may be noted that, while Lycian and Carian citadels
resemble those of Phoenicians, Hittites, and Cappadocians, the walls of
Tiryns were ascribed by tradition to Cyclops from Lycia.2 The so-called
wall of the Leleges at lassus consists of a towered enclosure of wide area,
as if to include huts. The walls are over three yards thick, the courses
regular and the joints vertical, otherwise the masonry is unsymmetrical,
single stones measuring three feet across occurring at intervals. Tlos,
with its impregnable Acropolis, Pydnai, a fortress with eleven towers,
placed at intervals round an irregular polygon, and the Acropolis of the
Carian city Alinda, are other examples of the so-called Cyclopean archi-
tecture in its traditional home.

Herodotus describes the Lycian customs as partly Cretan and partly
Carian,3 and supposes the people themselves to have been derived from
the first barbarous occupants of Crete — a relationship which might be
acceptable if the supposed order of migration were reversed. We hardly
know enough of Carian custom to judge what divergence from Cretan
usage an approach to it would imply ; but as, in Herodotus' time, Crete
was Hellenized and Lycia the seat of a pacific civilization, it is probably
the more archaic side of Lycian usage that was called Carian. Another
tradition makes the Leleges rulers over Carians in Crete, while a Carian
author speaks of his countrymen having reduced them to slavery like that
of the Helots and Penestse;4 from which it is at least safe to conclude that
both existed together in relations implying the Leleges to be the more
ancient of the two.

The Carians have left nothing behind them but citadel walls and
polyglot graffiti. The furthest point to the west at which distinct traces
of their settlement is met with is in Africa, in the name of one of the
towns restored or refurnished with colonists by the expedition sent under
Hanno in the first half of the 5th cent. B.C. " to found cities of Liby-
Phcenicians " on the coast of Mauretania. One of the towns mentioned
as already existing is called "Carian wall,"5 and the name must un-
doubtedly have preserved the memory of one of the early pre-Hellenic
generation of colonies. As bi-lingual mercenaries, the Carians probably

1 Hist. ofArt(Eng. tr.), v. 344. The god only spoke in winter, and was supposed
to adjourn to Delos for his summer villeggiatura. Cf. Herod., i. 182, 176. Xanthus,
it may be remembered, suffered two sieges, preferring ruin to surrender.

2 Strabo, viii. vi. n.

3 i- 173-

4 Mttller, Frag. Hist. Gr., iv. 475. Strabo (xiv. ii. 28), in referring to some of these
" various accounts," speaks of "the Carians, then called Leleges . . . governed by
Minos," and this association of ideas is nearly all that tradition has to contribute.

5 The so-called Periplus of Hanno is translated at length in the first volume of Purchas
his Pilgrimes, p. 78.

THE ETRUSCANS, LYCIANS, AND RHODIANS. 429

did almost as much as the Phoenicians by their commerce, to interpret
between the nations of the East and West ; and " Pram the interpreter/'
whose votive inscription in hieroglyphs and Carian is preserved in the
Gizeh Museum, may be allowed a passing mention as the representative of
a type.

The most striking of the Lycian customs is of course that of tracing
descent in the female line, and of taking — as might be said of the Etrus-
cans— the mother's, not the father's name, while the right of citizenship
also was derived from the mother ; the children of a slave mother took
servile rank, while those of a free woman by a slave father also followed
their mother's status. Agriculture and cattle-breeding were the staple
industries of the Lycians, and their manners and customs continued
unchanged long after the country was included in the empire of Rome.
Good government and aversion to violence were the characteristics of the
State and people by which foreigners were chiefly impressed, in spite of
the facilities for piracy afforded by good harbours on a rugged coast.

Lycia was allowed by the Romans to retain, to an exceptional extent,
the kind of republican freedom to which her people were attached.
According to Strabo, twenty-three Lycian towns formed a sort of federal
union, governed by a congress, forming the earliest example of a represen-
tative assembly in the modern sense.1 Other writers speak of the people
as having no laws, but being governed by ancient, unwritten custom.
They were also said to be " ruled by women," or to honour women more
than men; and one writer adds that, besides calling themselves after their
mothers, they bequeath their property to their daughters, not their sons.2
The Lycian inscriptions which have been read are too scanty to enable us
to judge in what sense and to what extent this is the case, but they prove
beyond a doubt that the position of daughters and of women in general
was in some way exceptional.

It is much to be desired that the whole mass of epigraphic material, old
and new, should be reviewed systematically, so as to bring together such
clues as the juxtaposition of names, localities, and customs may throw upon
the unwritten history of the early legendary races. A few specimens,
taken almost at random, will suffice to show the kind of material available,
which, in competent hands, would certainly not add less than Professor
Ramsay's geographical inquiries, to our knowledge of the history of Asia
Minor.

Out of twelve dedicatory inscriptions found in a single temenos at Cnidus,
all but one were made by women. The first is by Adinna, daughter of
Sopolios, wife of Poluchares and their children, to Demeter and Kore —
the constant objects of worship. Ada was sister of King Pixodarus and
daughter of Mausolus, so the occurrence of the characteristic diminutive
is a proof that " names of the Hekatomnos dynasty continued to be in
use in Karia even in late times." 3 Another woman dedicates a statue of

1 xiv. iii. 3. 2 Miiller, Frag. Hist. Graec., ii, p. 217 ; v. p. 461.

3 Ancient Greek Inscriptions in the British Museum, Ft. iv. Sect. I, 1893. Knidos,

43° FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

a sorrowful priestess to Demeter and Kore KCU, Oeols rots irapa
Three dedications in the same group are by Plathainis, wife of Plato, and
one refers to a worship instituted by a woman with some special reference
to her daughter. Damatria, wife of Eirenaios, dedicates her daughter's
son, Dion, to Artemis ; and a statue of Glykinora is dedicated to the Muses
by her father, her mother and two brothers (who bear the names of their
grandfathers) ; while at Halicarnassus five sons dedicate a figure of their
mother to Demeter and Kore.

The people and the council of Cnidus seem to have taken as much
interest as the Egyptian village councils in the domestic affairs of their
citizens. When a Cnidian lady dies in a neighbouring town, the latter
sends an embassy to condole with the husband, while widowers are also
consoled by permission to erect the statue which the boule and demos
decree. There seems to have been some connection between the award
of public honours and a spontaneous outbreak of public sentiment, which,
if measured by the volume of sound, according to some local standard,
might help to explain the origin of the Spartan method of voting for the
Ephors.1 The demonstration might be made in honour of the deceased
on the occasion of the funeral, or in honour of the living, as when the
name of Lykaithion, daughter of Aristokleidas, of Cnidus, to whom crowns
and a statue were decreed, was received with acclamations. The editor
understands two lines in the next inscription to mean that the boule
decided that the demiurgos (the highest official at Cnidus) should have
the name of this lady's husband proclaimed along with her own.2 In
Cnidus the eulogistic epithets bestowed on the ladies appear to be a
matter of form, though high birth seems to be alluded to in one case.

In one case a distant relative erects a statue to a lady on account of
her distinguished benefactions to the city ; and besides those set up by
relatives, monuments to women were frequently set up by the State. The
council, the Senate and the people of Tlos,3 commemorate the wife of a
Roman judge, — not necessarily as an indirect way of complimenting her
husband, as seems clear from an inscription at Stratonicaea, in Caria ; in
which it is said that the people has buried Philimion, a woman of Forasa,
who had lived righteously, and been among all worthy of the highest praise ;
as if it were customary among the Lycians and surrounding nations for
the virtues of women to receive, as they still do in China, the same kind
of posthumous honours as are granted to men. As in the funeral inscrip-
tions of Egypt, the praises accorded to the deceased attribute to him, or
her, the display of private virtues in public life, and this may be taken
also as the Chinese ideal, though in China the State is conceived to be

Halikarnassos and Branchidce, by Gustav Hirschfeld, DCCCin. p. 19. See also DCCCVI ,

VIII. -IX., DCCCXIII., DCCCXXI., DCCCXXIIL, DCCXCI., DCCCCIII.

1 7l>., Dccxcn. and DCCLXXXVIII.

2 L.c., DCCLXXXVIII., ix. and DCCLXC.

3 Sir Charles Fellows' Journal, vol. ii. pp. 38, 40 ; see also, Account of Discoveries
in Lycia, pp. 162, 98, 257, 265, 167, 84, 41, 107, 241, 207 ; and Appendix A., pp. 330,
324, 389, 3i6, 353, 377, 404, 342, and 399.

THE ETRUSCANS, LYCIANS, AND RHODIANS. 43*

interested in honouring any exceptional manifestation of even purely
domestic virtue.

The intermingling of public and private relations is curiously illustrated
by a decree authorizing one Callias, " a good and honourable man who
has unceasingly done great service to his native city," to console himself
for the loss of his son, by putting up statues in the temples and public
places to his memory. Sometimes in Lycia the inscription only states
that "the council, the elders, the people, and the young men,"1 honour
such a person. Aristocles Molossus is described as "a lover of glory and
his native town," and in general the praise accorded seems to rest upon
the memory of acceptable services. " The council and people honoured,
even after he had departed, Metrodorus Demetrius . . . living de-
cently, a man of honourable ambition in public affairs and showing zeal in
offices, the superintending of works and other services to the common-
wealth." The city of Tlos again resolved to honour in the Prytaneum " a
good man, like his ancestors a benefactor of the people ; who contested
manfully and excelled in the wars, who observed the laws, discharged
office gloriously and liberally, and conducted himself in the commonwealth
honourably, fortunately, and righteously." Inscriptions of the same type
might be multiplied indefinitely.

It is true that Cicero ridicules the honorific decrees of Greek cities which
were so lavishly bestowed, that they ceased to confer any distinction ; and
Professor Mahaffy2 supposes that they were the reward given by the mob
in return for gifts from the rich who feared unpopularity. But this expla-
nation, though doubtless applicable to a good many Greek statues, does
not account for the use of similar terms of eulogy in private tombs
erected by relatives of the deceased. In the south-west of Asia Minor,
where these inscriptions are most numerous, and most frequently made in
commemoration of women, if they are prompted by gratitude for bene-
factions received, the benefactions are frankly described, and praised
openly and without disguise. This is scarcely the early Greek view, and the
habit of praising private persons for their public generosity is peculiarly
characteristic of those inhabitants of Asia Minor who followed the Lycian
use, and held the same views as the ancient Egyptians as to the responsi-
bilities of wealth. Just as the Egyptian priests earned praise and popularity
by spending a liberal portion of the temple revenues at their disposal, on
shows and festivals for the entertainment of the people, Carian priests and
priestesses were commemorated for the liberality with which they spent
the revenue of the sacred lands and the donations to the temple made by
the people themselves.

At the temple of Hekate, at Lagina, and that of Zeus Panamarus, at
Stratonicaea, in Caria, there were priestly families, out of which the high
priest for the year was chosen, preference being perhaps given to the one

1 Cf. Cretan inscriptions, where the troops of unmarried youths and the adult citizens
are frequently mentioned as distinct elements in the body politic.
8 The Greek World under Roman Sway, pp. 263, 310.

432 FROM MASSAL1A TO MALABAR.

who made the largest promises of liberality.1 It is certain that such digni-
taries were commonly praised for having fulfilled their promises, as well as
for definite gifts. At Stratonicsea the temple feasts lasted nineteen days,
during which time corn, oil, perfumes, meat, and money were distributed
by the priests, who supplemented the sacred revenues out of their own re-
sources. Friends and relatives might " associate themselves in the glorious
work." A certain person and his wife, on such an occasion, distributed
oil for use at the public baths, we are told, "for the first time," the inven-
tion of new liberalities being regarded as a high distinction. Another
inscription tells how Jason and his wife, " with his dear aunt, his mother
and his brother, iuspired by Zeus, gave repasts well apportioned . . ."
his gifts came to 10,000 denarii, and at his expense, meals were served
separately both to men and women ; the crowning liberality apparently
was to let people carry away what they liked from the feasts.

The commonest formula of praise for liberal priests is that they fulfilled
the obligations of piety towards the gods and liberality towards men. One
inscription mentions the succour given to those in want, in addition to ordi-
nary largesses and buildings and furniture presented to the temples. And
a Carian inscription records, in the same strain, how certain persons, " who
have made themselves useful to society in general and its members in
particular, without neglecting any opportunity," were, as a reward, to be
inscribed in the temple of Artemis, and to receive each " a double portion
as long as they live."

At Syllion, in Pamphylia, three statues were found — two of a lady, Meno-
dora, and one of her son, Megacles, which record the distributions of
money and corn when Menodora was high priestess, priestess, demiurge,
and decaprote, and when her son was demiurge, and her daughter gymnasi-
arch. Menodora must have been a wealthy woman, for she gave 300,000
denarii "for the children of Syllion," and sacred objects of the same
value to each of three temples, besides the other benefactions and dis-
tributions of money to all classes of the community, according to their
degree, citizens, ecclesiasts, elders, and so forth.2 This is the first in-
stance met with of a women holding the office of decaprote and demiurge ;
five other magistracies were already known from the inscriptions to have
been occupied by women ; and Lyciarchissa, as well as Lyciarch, appears
among titles of the officers of the Lycian league. Every municipal office
seems to have been open to women in these Amazonian regions. Indeed,
local custom on this point was so strong that women, as well as men,
appear as archisynagogoi.3

The common meals of the Carthaginians, Cretans, and Tyrrhenians are
more ancient than the public games of Greece and Rome, and it seems
probable that the form of public and private liberalities in Lycia, Caria,

1 Bulletin de Cor. Hellen, 1887, p. 56 ; cf. also pp, '5, 156, 372 ; 1889, pp. 486, and
1890, p. 374.

2 Bulletin, 1889, pp. 486-496.

3 The Clnirch in the Roman Empire, p. 480.

THE ETRUSCANS, LYCIANS,' AND RHODIANS. 433

and allied districts in Asia Minor,1 was a survival from, or a modification of,
the early communistic institution, rather than a form of ransom paid to
the democracy by the rich. The public meals in Sparta were supplemented
by voluntary gifts, and the notion of honorary maintenance, towards which
the double portion is a step, would hardly have been arrived at apart from
such meals.

In the same way, the practice of commemorating the dead in private
tombs preceded the bestowal of such favours as that accorded to Callias
in the public memorials of his son. For such a boon as this to be of the
highest value, presupposes a feeling like that of the Egyptians, as to the
importance to the dead of the remembrance in which they are held by the
living ; and in fact, throughout Lycia, Caria, and all kindred settlements,
property in tombs is as highly valued and as stringently protected as in the
Nile Valley. Men and women erect tombs in which they themselves and
their nearest relations are to be interred ; the degree of relationship at
which the privilege ceases is strictly defined. In one case four generations
were to be buried in one tomb, but this is rare ; more commonly the
builder of the tomb designs it for his wife and children, or at most his
grandchildren.2 One Aurelia Papiana bought a tomb in which her husband
and his foster mother were to be buried, his and her daughter and herself,
but no one else, unless she gave permission to any one to use the sub-
structure, which was regarded as less sacred and inviolable than the tomb
itself. A citizen of Tlos and his wife reserved their tomb to themselves,
and his heir Soteris, and her descendants, and those to whom she might
give permission to use it, as she did to her husband and his foster sister.
In this case the penalty decreed for encroachment on the property was a
fine of a thousand denarii to be divided between the people of Tlos and
the informer.

Another citizen desired to be buried with his first wife in a sarcophagus,
his second wife and her son being interred in another compartment, and
two other children in the substructure, after which the whole tomb was to
be closed. If these injunctions were disregarded by his heirs, then
Aphrodite should be his heir, and should moreover exact a penalty of
5,000 denarii, of which one-third was to go to the informer. A similar
fine, to the people of Cadyanda, was designed to protect the purpose of a
man who had built a tomb for himself, his daughter and her descendants ;
and a woman of Telmessus made similar dispositions with the same
security.

In Phrygia and Lycaonia the common imprecatory formula is often, even
in Greek inscriptions, expressed in the native language, so as to be the

1 M. Revillout suggests that the conversion of the palace of Croesus into a gerusia or
home of rest for old men, mentioned by Vitruvius (De Architectura> ii. 10) may point to
an institution with Babylonian and Chinese parallels.

2 The restriction is no doubt intended to guard against the danger of a remote ancestor-
being turned out of the family tomb by some one anxious to provide piously but
inexpensively for .his immediate progenitor, a tendency which the practical Chinese
provide for and legalize.

P.O. F F

434 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

better understood of the people,1 — a precaution we can well believe to
have been necessary in a land where a Marcus Aurelius rejoices in the truly
barbaric cognomen Ouababsis. Seven of the inscriptions published by Mr.
Headlam from Sinabich, in Isauria, the site of the Byzantine bishopric of
Dalisandos, contain certain or possible traces of the habit of counting
descent from the mother. Dalisandos itself has a characteristic termination,
and was doubtless the site of a native settlement of considerable antiquity.
" The hill is a striking one, isolated on three sides, and crowned by a high
cliff ; up the south slope winds an ancient roadway, which conducts to a
plateau on the top of the hill," 2 and on " the Sacra via, which runs along
north and east of the plateau," a great number of sarcophagi were found,
apparently belonging to the 2nd cent. A.D.

According to the inscriptions, Silas, son of Nenesis, otherwise called
Kleoneikos, and Nenesis, wife of Iambics, otherwise called Tatas, set up
one memorial : . . . son of Turannis makes another, for himself, his
wife and his children. Another is erected by Turannis, daughter of
Trokondis. Then we have the above named Marcus Aurelius Ouababsis,
the son of Trokondis, and Tatis his wife, establishing for themselves a tomb,
into which Indas, son of Montanus, who calls himself " of the family,"
seems to have thrust himself later. Tatas, son of Trokondis, defends the
tomb of his daughter Nesa by a penalty of 2,500 denarii to be paid on
contravention to the fisc ; and Hermokrates, the son of Trokondis, takes
the moon to witness that what he has built is lawful only to his wife and
children. Another tomb is built by " Irdis, son of Killis." It is not
absolutely certain that Killis and Trokondis are feminine names, like
Turannis and Nenesis, and the argument from the termination has little
weight, as the final as and is are characteristic of the language ; Tarasis,
for instance, is a common man's name.3 Other inscriptions will, no doubt,
settle the point, and meanwhile the survival of the Lycian use is proved,
whatever may be the exact number of examples of it yet met with.

Another inscription found at Mut was set up by the daughter of
Ophia "for her husband, and father, and mother, and the race of Ophia."
And there is a clear indication of the still more archaic custom of counting
daughters' descendants as the representatives of the family, in the record
of a religious foundation by one Posidonius.4 In accordance with an
oracle of Apollo of Telmessus (in all probability the Carian town),
Posidonius enjoins his descendants, and those who marry wives from
among them (including future generations), that certain lands of his shall
be mortgaged, " the eldest male member of the family having for the time
the usufruct of the revenues arising from them, with a reservation of
four gold staters per annum for the prescribed sacrifices."

The editor notes that the benefits of the foundation are extended to

1 Ecclesiastical Sites in Isauria, by Arthur C. Headlam. Society for the Promotion
of Hellenic Studies, Supplementary papers, i. 1892, p. 31.

2 /£., p. 26.

3 L.C., pp. 27-33. Cf. C.I.G., 4300 and 4306.

4 Ancient Greek Inscriptions, I.e., DCCCXCVI.

THE ETRUSCANS, LYCIANS, AND RHODIANS. 435

descendants in the female line, but adds : " this has nothing to do with
the general position of women in Karia, since it is also to be found in the
testament of Epikteta." The latter,1 however, was found at Thera, the
site of an archaic Necropolis, and it is perhaps a question whether the
argument might not be inverted, and the family of Epikteta credited with
the maintenance of some approach to Carian custom. In a list of persons
chosen for the gerusia of Sidyma, also in the 2nd cent. A.D., there are
two who are described as sons of such a mother, and many who have no
patronymic. And if, as seems probable, Bachofen is right in identifying
the"Kunis"2 of a thirteenth- century crusader with Konia, the ancient
Iconium, the practice of transmitting property through women continued
at least down to the Middle Ages. If there were any doubt as to the
pre-Hellenic character and origin of these traits, it would be removed
by the persistence with which some of them have endured to the present
day.

Sir Charles Fellows noticed that a modern Carian, in accepting an
engagement, would explain his willingness to leave home by saying : " I
have no mother ; I can go anywhere with you, no one depends upon me."
And alongside with the special regard for the mother which the phrase
indicates, the same traveller noted traces of the customary succession to
the family property by the married son, even during the father's life, which
is among the most characteristic features in the family law of Egypt.

Primogeniture, of which so few traces are found in Greek States, was
recognised in Cnidus (and " some other places "), where only the father, or
the eldest son after the father's death, was entitled to participate in the
government.8

A curious light is thrown upon the workings of the religious endowments
of the country by a decree of the people and senate of Halicarnassus,
that the priesthood of Artemis Pergaea should be put up for sale.4 It is
scarcely singular that, when the hereditary wealth of the temple was made
away with, and the line of succession broken, the habit of looking to
wealthy priests, to spend money on the public, should have prompted the
sale of the vacant office. But the inscription also shows that here, as in
Egypt, the priestly revenues were still derived in great part from the people.
It is specified that the priestess (who was appointed for life) should have
the same share of private as of public sacrifices ; and other interesting par-
ticulars relate to collections made by the priestess, and to a sort of tax
levied by the State on the inveterate liberality of the faithful, collecting
boxes, the contents of which belonged to the State, being placed outside
the temples.

One of the earliest of the inscriptions from Halicarnassus,5 if the~
Lygdamis named in it is rightly identified with the enemy of Herodotus,

1 C, 7. G. , 2448, and Benndorf, Das Heroon von Gjolbaschi- Trysa, p. 44.

" Ze Kunis erbent ouch de Wib und nicht die Man." (Das Mtttterrecht, p. 390.)

3 Aristotle, Politics, v. 6, § 4. Cf. post, p. 473.

4 Knidos^ Halikarnassos, and Branchidce, DCCCXCV. 5 /£., DCCCLXXXVI., p. 51.

436 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

refers in a tantalising manner to some change in the laws relating to land
and houses, but without enabling us to conjecture what the law was, either
before or afterwards. Some of the expressions, however, are so curiously
similar to those referring to a special period of innovation in the laws of
Crete, that one is tempted to wonder whether this decree also marks a
victory of Greek ideas over archaic customs. At a conference of the
Halikarnassians and Salmakitans with Lygdamis, ". . . it was re-
solved (in regard to) the Mnemones : neither land nor houses shall be sur-
rendered (for sale) to the Mnemones of the time when Apollonides son of
Lygdamis (and another) held office at Halikarnassos and (two others) at
Salmakis. But if any one wishes to go to law about land or houses he must
prefer his claim within eighteen months from the date of this resolution ;
and in accordance with the law as hitherto, dikasts shall be sworn on the
facts as known to the Mnemones. But if any one prefers a claim after
that term of eighteen months, the person in possession of the land or
houses must take an oath, to be administered by the dikasts after having
received half a nekte ; the oath shall be taken in the presence of the
claimant, and those shall be legal possessors of land and houses, who held
the land and houses at the time when Apollonides and Panamyas were
Mnemones, unless they have sold the property since." Then follow
penalties against any one attempting to annul the law, and the decree
concludes : " The preferring of claims shall be open to every one of the
Halikarnassians who does not transgress that which has been sworn to,
and has been written down accordingly in the temple of Apollo."

M. Dareste 1 supposes this inscription to commemorate a sort of truce
between the party of Lygdamis and their opponents, including an amnesty
for all who sign it, and the right of those profiting by the amnesty to
recover property confiscated during the civil war. He reads the first clause
as a prohibition to the Mnemones, or Recorders, to put any more of the
confiscated property up for sale. This view receives some support from
the law of Ephesus2 (84 B.C.), which provides a special Board of Arbitra-
tion to decide disputes between debtor and creditor, avowedly in reference
to the recent war ; but in neither case is there any direct mention of con-
fiscated property, and the phraseology of the Halicarnassian decree is
susceptible of an interpretation which will make its resemblance with that
of Ephesus still closer.

If we ask what questions can arise touching the ownership of lands
and houses, for the solution of which a general period of a year and a
half had to be granted, or how the distinction should arise between a class
of persons claiming ownership and a class of persons enjoying posses-
sion, one possible answer suggests itself. The period of grace would not
be required in the case of disputes between ordinary landlords and tenants,
and the only other case in which the antithesis between the owner and the
occupier presents itself is that of the antichretic or Babylonian mortgage.

1 Rectieil des Inscriptions juridiques Grecques. Texte, trad^lct^oni comnientaire, far
R. Dareste, B. Haussoulier et Th. Reinach, 1891, pt. i. p. 3. 2 2b., p. 30.

THE ETRUSCANS, LYCIANS, AND RHODIANS. 437

It seems, to say the least of it, possible that the decree was directed
against these agreements, which debar the capitalist from acquiring the
freehold, of the land mortgaged to him, by any length of prescription ; and
that owners, who had ceded the possession of lands or houses, were warned
to reclaim them (i.e. to pay off the mortgage) within eighteen months, or
let the mortgagee establish his title (as owner of an unredeemed pledge)
on oath. The proviso, " unless they have sold the property since," is quite
intelligible on this view. And the connection between the civil disorders
and the need for legislation would be only that the disorders had caused an
abnormal multiplication of mortgages and some uncertainty as to title deeds.

At Ephesus the reason for referring disputes respecting mortgages to
arbitration was that the value of the lands ceded might have been affected
by the war. It seems to have been assumed that the amount of the
original debt could be established by evidence, but that there might be a
difference of opinion as to the value of the land pledged as security, and
the compromise proposed was for the land to be divided, either voluntarily
or by arbitration, between the debtor and creditor, so as to cancel all
liabilities. If there is any dispute as to the ultimate ownership, " the
question shall be decided according to law." 1

The important inscription of Tenos,2 which records forty-seven sales of
lands or houses, shows that a " mortgage effected by a peculiar form of
sale " was in use among the Greeks, at least in certain places. " The real
property was mortgaged, and the form by which it was conveyed to the
mortgagee was by an actual purchase, with power of redemption on re-
payment of the loan." Inscriptions found at the Carian town of Mylasa 3
relate to leases in the form of a mortgage, and it is perhaps hardly by
accident that we find also at Orchomenus an inscription respecting a loan
to the city,4 which was only partly liquidated and the creditor allowed as
interest for the remainder, to enjoy a limited right of pasture in the
Orchomenian land. In all these cases, usages that seem exceptional and
perplexing among Greeks would be familiar and intelligible if derived by
them from an earlier stock.

1 Guardians and parents were not to be allowed to claim " the benefit of the war,"
and among the latter " those who owe dowries to their daughters " are specially men-
tioned— a noteworthy phrase, pointing to an archaic conception of the rights of children.
(/£., p. 37.) Creditors, who before a certain specified date have taken possession of the
land pledged, and drawn the fruits of it, are to be maintained in possession, unless they
consent to any other agreement, — meaning, perhaps, that if they have not acquired
the final rights of ownership, they may retain possession if they satisfy the mortgagor
respecting the price of that right. If the creditor has taken possession after the said
date (when a decree in favour of the debtors was passed), the latter must be reinstated or
the land divided as above proposed. Contracts made since the termination of the war
were not interfered with, as it was taken for granted that in them the depreciation of real
property would be known and allowed for.

2 A.G.I., pt. ii. Edited by C. T. Newton, CCCLXXVII. 1. 73 and 1. 116-121, pp. 149,
150; and Recueil, i. p. 90. Cf. also Caillemer, Contrat de frit (I Athenes, Trans, of
the Caen Academy, 1870, and Boeckh, Political Economy of Athens, p. 671. The
ancient name of Tenos was Hydrussa. Cf. also Strabo, x. v. n.

3 Recueil, pt. ii. pp. v. and 272. These will be referred to again in chap. x.

4 Leake, ii. p. 152. Recueil, ii. 277.

438 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

The simple letting of sacred pastures was a sufficiently common occur-
rence, and an archaic inscription of Tegea1 suggests how the practice arose.
The right of priests to pasture cattle on the sacred lands had to be re-
gulated, if only in the interests of the temple and each other, and thus the
money value of the right came to be appraised, and counted as a possible
source of revenue. At Tegea, passing strangers were allowed to graze
their animals for one day and night if they came for the sacrifice. And,
if we may judge from a very amusing Athenian decree of the 4th century,
sentiment was divided on the subject as to whether it was quite respectful
to the gods, to raise money, even for sacred uses, from their property.2

Apart from the inscriptions, what little is recorded concerning the
manners and customs of Lycians, Carians, and Cretans is in favour of the
affinities claimed for them. It was a Carian as well as a Basque custom
for women to eat apart from men ; Garian queens, like Egyptian ones, were
married to their brothers, and the same license was used also by the kings
of Sidon. Strange to say, this custom still survives among a remarkable
people described by one of the latest travellers in Caria and Lycia. The
Tachtadschy are a short, high-headed people, scattered in small communi-
ties in Caria and Lycia, living mostly in the mountains,, where they work as
wood-sawyers, only descending to the towns to dispose of their beams
and planks.3 They are nominally Mahomedans, but they drink wine, do
not observe Ramadan, and are called Satan worshippers by their orthodox
neighbours. They believe in metempsychosis, and have religious chiefs of
their own; this office is so far hereditary that it must pass always in the
same line, so that they are obliged to marry within it, but the inheritance
may pass with the " Baba's " soul to others than a son. They go round
among the scattered families of the stock and hold religious meetings, with
excited songs and dances.

They are accused of indulging in monstrous orgies ; but this opinion may
be based partly upon these meetings, and partly on the fact that the women
go unveiled and take part in the family meals. The other accusation
brought against them, of marrying their sisters, is better founded, and Dr.
v. Luschau met himself with two unmistakable cases of the practice. He
believes the people to be a stranded relic of the pre-Hellenic population.
In general his observations show two distinct types of skull prevailing in Asia
Minor, the two extremes recognised by craniologists being common, while

1 Bulletin, 1889, p. 281 ff.

2 Ib., p. 433 ff. Some one had let or proposed to let sacred temple lands, and it was
agreed that if they were let, the rent should be spent on sacred buildings. But before
this was clone, it was agreed that two questions (viz., whether it was for the profit and
benefit of the Athenian people to let these lands, or to leave them, as formerly, unculti-
vated in honour of the Eleusinian goddess) should be written on two plates of metal of
the same size and shape. These were to be carefully wrapped up and placed in an urn of
bronze. Then the treasurers of the goddess are to bring two urns, one gold and one silver ;
the bronze urn is to be shaken, and then the Epistates'is to open it and take out the two —
now indistinguishable— packets, and place one in the gold and one in the silver urn. They
then send to Delphi to ask the god whether they are to do in accordance with the
writing contained in the gold or that in the silver urn ! Cf. also A.G.L, CCCXLIX.

3 It will be remembered that the "hewers of wood " to the people of Israel were a
distinct race, taken from the pre-Semitic occupants of the land.

THE ETRUSCANS, LYCIANS, AND RHODIANS. 439

the meso-cephalic mean comes to only about 2 per cent, of the whole. One
of these types is the short, high head of the Tachtadschys, resembling that
of the Armenians, who, according to v. Luschau, are the most homogeneous
of any people ; A and the other long, comparatively low, due to Semitic,
Greek, and other later influences. The custom of elongating the head by
artificial pressure is still practised, and suggests that the people practising
it must be descended from the Macrones or Macrocephali of the Greeks.2

Individual Jews and Syrians are found who belong craniologically to the
non-Semitic type, and the persistence of the two types, and the comparative
absence of intermediate forms, supplies a strong argument in favour of the
permanence of the trait, and so at once of its antiquity and its hereditary
character. The modern Tachtadschys have little to bequeath, and hence
their adherence to their primitive marriage customs must be the result of
blindly conservative instinct ; but the survival of the demand that both
parents of the religious chief should belong to the same family is probably
a survival from the time when the abuse had the same motive as in Egypt.

We know nothing, of course, of the domestic customs of the Leuco-
Syrians or Cappadocians of the prehistoric monuments. Prof. Ramsay is
disposed to recognise female figures in the bas-reliefs of lasili-kaia, where
M. Perrot took the costume to indicate priests ; and, if the former view is
correct, it will be an indication of some approach to Amazonian usage.3 It
may be a mere accident that Strabo, a native of Pontus, should refer
exclusively and repeatedly to his maternal ancestry, going back to the
fourth generation. And if Strabo's account of the kingdom of Pythodoris, in
this very region, had stood alone, the rule of a queen might also have been
treated as a matter of chance, not warranting any sociological inferences.

Recent discoveries have, however, brought to light the existence of
something like a whole feminine dynasty, both the mother and daughter of
Pythodoris, as well as herself, having apparently royal rank apart from
their husbands.4 Pythodorus, the father of Pythodoris, was not of royal
birth. Strabo describes him as a native of Nysa, possessed of great wealth,
settled in Tralles, and a friend of Pompey. His wife's name is Antonia,
and Pythodoris is named before Polemon, her husband, in the text to which
this information is owing. Mommsen is at some pains to find a daughter of
Antonius the triumvir who might have married Pythodorus, and so caused
his dynasty to be accepted by the Romans ; but apart from the impropriety,
from the Roman point of view, of such an alliance, which he admits, there
are only three or four years, before 30 B.C., during which a daughter of
Antony's wife, Antonia, could, according to his reckoning, have been
married to Pythodorus. Yet, long afterwards, we find Pythodoris called
) and Antonia euergetis ; while Pythodoris reigns, in her own right,

1 See, however, Miss Garnett, The Women of Turkey, p. 208.

2 Rawlinson's Herodotus, iv. p. 224.

3 Or to the prevalence of the same sort of worship as that described by Strabo at the
Pontic Comana, making the place "almost a little Corinth."

4 Mommsen, Ephemeris Epigraphica> i. 270. Ramsay, The Church in the Roman
Empire,^. 372 ff.

440 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

I
after the death of her husband Polemon, and can scarcely have done so in

virtue of her father's title, which was certainly no better than her husband's.

The petty monarchies which it suited the Romans to recognise between
their own provinces and the Parthians depended for their existence upon
the active good-will of their native subjects, as well as upon Roman toler-
ance. Supposing for the moment — and the Roman birth of Antonia,
mother of Pythodoris, is itself only a supposition — that some approach to
the Egyptian theory of royal descent prevailed in Cappadocia, it would
evidently suit both parties to arrange a marriage between the heiress of a
native royal family and a trusted partisan or nominee of the Romans.
Such a consort, by native usage, would bear the name of king ; but the
hereditary right to the throne would vest in his wife's daughter, or it might
be in his wife's daughter's son. On this hypothesis Antony would be at
most the godfather of the wife of Pythodorus, and her name, Antonia, any
way, only adopted out of compliment to Rome, or in gratitude for Roman
recognition.

Whatever may be the true version of the ancestry of Queen Pythodoris,
it is clearly established by the evidence of coins that her daughter
Tryphsena, who married Cotys, king of Thrace, and was the mother of three
kings, of Thrace, Pontus, and Armenia Minor, first reigned in Pontus in her
own right, having her son, Polemon, who succeeded her in Pontus, asso-
ciated with her during her own reign. This Queen Tryphaena was a
personage of some importance, held in honour in Cyzicus, and occupying a
sufficient space in popular imagination for her to be associated in early
Christian legend with Saint Thekla, herself a heroine of decidedly indigenous
type, whose "story was quoted as early as the second century as a justification
of the right of women to teach and baptise;" while as late as the ninth
century she is mentioned as privileged above other women in these respects.
In her legend, as analysed by Professor Ramsay, the persistence of national
habits of thought through all changes of government and religion is as
conspicuous as in Coptic hagiology. Egyptian legend is fond of the idea
of holy women who live and die disguised as monks or hermits ; and
St. Thekla here is represented as wishing to cut off her hair and follow St.
Paul (to whom her conversion is attributed). She does wander forth alone,
and claims immunity from the insults to which she is thus exposed as a
noble maiden engaged in the service of " the God," i.e. one of the
theophoretoi) associated, certainly, with the least Christian side of the
ancient national religion. The lady Tryphsena of the legend, in whom it
is proposed to see a reminiscence of the historical queen of Pontus, takes
charge of the saint during her trial, and becomes so attached to her as to
adopt her as a daughter, and refuse to give her up for judgment.

The coins of Pontus and the Acta Sanctorum have not, at first sight,
much to do with each other ; but the light both together throw on a passage
of Strabo, which is not of much importance by itself, warrants the belief that
we have by no means yet heard the last word on many points as to which
historical science has only just learnt to state its problems correctly.

THE ETRUSCANS, LYCIANS, AND RHODIANS. 441

§ 3. RHODES.

The obstacles which the Taurus mountains placed in the way of the
continuous spread of Hittite or Syro-Cappadocian culture along the
southern coast of Asia Minor led, as already observed, to the early settle-
ment of the islands opposite. By their geographical position, Cyprus and
Rhodes were the first seats of Eastern influence in the Western sea. The
debts of the former to Hittite scribes and Phoenician traders have already
been acknowledged, and the abundant remains of archaic art in the island
have received so much attention of late that it is sufficient to refer to the
works dealing with them. But in the case of Rhodes — a smaller island, in
which the antiquities of different ages have chased and superseded each
other — more is to be gleaned respecting the life and temper of the people
from later written records than from the silent witness of irrefragable
archaeological facts.

According to the legendary account of Rhodes, the autochthonous
inhabitants were driven out by Phoenicians, and the latter dispossessed by
Carians before the Dorian immigration. One version makes the primitive
inhabitants (the Telchines) masters of magical, mechanical, and metallurgical
arts ; awd it is worth noticing that the Curetes, the Idsean Dactyli, and other
mysterious people whose names survive in connection with religious
mysteries — mostly of Thracian and Phrygian origin — were supposed to
have the same numerical divisions as the historic population. Thus
Diodorus writes of the Idaean Dactyls, quoting the account of the first
inhabitants of the island given by Cretan historians : " Some say these were
100 in number, others but ten in number, called dactyli from the ten
fingers on men's hands." Yet another version speaks of 52 (half the
Carthaginian 104), and another of three. Homer speaks in the same
passage of the great wealth showered on the Rhodians, and of " their tribes
in three companies," to whom the three cities, "Lindus, lalysus, and the
white Camerinus," owed their origin. The later history of the island does
not indicate any influx of Greeks larger than could be peaceably absorbed ;
and Strabo's account of the Rhodians makes it probable that the long-
continued prosperity of the island was due to her having retained the
manners and customs of her first settlers. The Rhodians, according to
him, though their form of government was not democratic, were attentive to
the welfare of the commonalty. " The people receive allowances of corn,
and the rich support the needy according to an ancestral usage."1 There
were also public institutions, the object of which was to purchase and distri-
bute provisions, so that the poor might be able to subsist ; and large sums
used to be presented to the State by private citizens for public purposes, as
well as for the maintenance of the poor.

A Rhodian inscription has been found concerning gifts of oil, from
which it seems that different persons were in the habit of giving or

1 Strabo, xiv. ii. 5.

442 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

selling this commodity on specially favourable terms,1 so that an agree-
ment had to be come to among them to prevent the dates of their gifts
interfering with one another, and it was decided that they should draw lots
as to which day each should give his portion. This is a distinct confirma-
tion of Strabo's statement, and like the donations and feasts given in
Lycia, seems as if it might be related to the gifts for public meals usual in
Crete and Sparta.

A subscription list,2 attributed to the 3rd cent. B.C., records the
contributions made by all the people of Lindus, to provide what was
necessary for the worship of Athena, the city goddess. The list is
interesting because of its completeness ; the names of women and minors
appear in it, and it seems that in such cases they must do so on account
of separate and independent property. The lists are arranged by localities,
as if the properties were gone through seriatim, and all landowners or
householders were expected to contribute. Married women, however,
frequently appear as well as their husbands, and as members of a different
deme ; and this looks like a survival from the pre-Hellenic proprietary
independence of women, though associated with the Greek usage of their
acting through a kurios. In one of the many inscriptions which show that
the erection of honorific statues began with private affection rather than
public ambition, we find two maternal grandmothers contributing to the
memorial erected to a young married woman ; and another inscription
mentions a son, named after a maternal grandfather ; but a minute analysis
of otherwise uninteresting records — mostly inedited because of their want
of interest — would be necessary before we could judge how far the early
Rhodian theory of relationship approximated to that of Egypt and Lycia.

In its civil administration and material splendour Rhodes resembled
Carthage, Marseilles, and Cyzicus in the Propontis. The point common
and peculiar to these cities, according to Strabo, was the attention paid to
public buildings and storehouses for the reception of corn and munitions
of war ; official architects were employed to direct the manufacture of
engines, and to take charge of edifices belonging to the State, and it is
implied that the outer aspect of the cities named was as similar as their
methods of administration. In other respects Rhodes had a strongly
marked individuality, and exercised an influence in the Old World
strangely out of proportion to the size and resources of the State.

Alexander the Great recognised the uprightness of the Rhodians by
leaving his will in their keeping. Their coinage was generally adopted
in the 4th cent. B.C., and they were expected to keep down piracy and
act as commercial go-between to surrounding powers. Their role was that
of a neutral state offering arbitration in the interests of peace ; yet when
the Byzantines claimed to levy tolls on the commerce passing through the
Straits, on the plea of expense incurred in controlling the pirates of Thrace,
it was the business of Rhodes to go to war for the general benefit. The

1 Bulletin de Cor. Hel., 1883, p. 97.

2 /£., p. 80. For another, to equip a naval expedition, see A.G.I > CCCXLIII.

THE ETRUSCANS, LYCIANS, AND RHODIANS. 443

islanders were victorious, but gave up all their conquests and granted peace
to Byzantium, without demanding a fine or tribute, on condition that the
objectionable duties were abolished. Such disinterestedness helps to
explain the political prominence accorded to the State in the third century.

The influence of Rhodes seems to have been secured, like that of
China, over the territories she annexes, by moral ascendency and the
feeling of benefits conferred. The total value of the gifts sent to the
island after the great earthquake has been estimated at a million sterling ;
and though some of these may have been prompted by a desire to guard
against the danger of a commercial crisis, which would have affected other
countries, if many houses in such a great banking centre had been ruined,
yet it is not every commercial capital which would have such a fund
raised for its benefit in time of need. Business must have been done
honourably and liberally in a city, when the first thought of those
frequenting it is, not how to supplant, but how to restore it when
endangered.

Young men were sent to Rhodes to learn business, as they might be
sent now to London or Hamburg ; and it is characteristic also of the
respect for contracts which prevailed there, that when the Romans
proposed a general remission of debts after the civil war, the Rhodians
alone refused to take advantage of it. Filial piety combined with
commercial honour to produce another trait, and at Rhodes a son was
considered liable for the full payment of his father's debts,1 when by
Roman law he was allowed to escape the liability by renouncing the
inheritance.

On the other hand, Rome adopted the maritime law of Rhodes. A
decision of Antoninus Pius was quoted : " I rule the land, but the law
rules the sea. Let the matter be judged by the naval law of the Rhodians
in so far as any of our own laws do not conflict with that." Rhodian usage
was thus probably an important element in that rational and equitable
" law of nations," the credit of which M. Revillout has sought to reclaim
for its forgotten authors. The genuineness of the collection of maritime
laws ascribed to the Rhodians was questioned by Pardessus,3 though he
admitted it might preserve the tradition of old naval custom. It contains,
however, some passages which internal evidence alone would suffice to
connect with the body of early Mediterranean law common to the first
maritime colonists of its islands and the shores of Greece and Italy.

Any one hiring a vessel and paying earnest money, and then changing
his mind, forfeits the earnest, while the skipper who fails to complete the
contract gives back twice the earnest he had received. This law governed
the land market in Crete, and it is met with in a Syro-Roman compilation
of the 5th cent. A.D., in which many characteristic customs of Western
Asia are preserved. Another article of the Rhodian code is so exactly
like Chinese law that one is tempted to predict the discovery of a

1 Cf. the Chinese maxim : Father's debts, son pays.

2 Collection de Lois Maritime*, vol. i. c. vi. pp. 219-260. J. M. Pardessus, 1828.

444 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

Babylonian equivalent, which would have all the attraction of a missing
link. If a sailor injures another in a quarrel, he must pay the doctor1
and the wages of the victim while he remains kors de combat, and he has
to pay damages for any permanent injury resulting from his violence.

The one maxim of Roman naval law expressly stated to be derived
from that of Rhodes lays down that if cargo be jettisoned to lighten the
ship, all owners of freight contribute to make good the loss incurred for
the common benefit; and the crew and passengers were required also
to pay a personal contribution to make good loss from this cause, as well
as from unavoidable accidents, fire, pillage, etc. Each voyage, in fact, was
regarded very much in the light of a co-operative partnership, and the
wages of all classes of seamen were fixed by custom at a proportional
number of shares in the adventure, common sailors, the pilot, steersman,
carpenter, and captain being paid in this way in order of their importance.

As already mentioned, loans on bottomry were not allowed by Rhodian
law to hold the usurer exempt from risk ; and the same feeling of equity
evidently underlies the Syrian customary law,2 according to which money
borrowed on half profits for commercial purposes need only be half repaid
if lost. In externals, the people are described as serious, and with a
strong sense of propriety and decorum. "The every-day duties of life
were performed with perfect finish, and even the rustics seemed less
clumsy than usual in the gymnasium there. They dined quietly like
connoisseurs, but cared more for conversation than drinking ; their dress
was simple, and their movements in the streets grave and composed/'' 3

The temper and habits of the people in modern Rhodes are described
by a contemporary tourist in a manner which recalls to mind at once
those of the Kabyles and the Basques. Guests are still entertained by the
villagers collectively, the householders bringing contributions of food
according to their means ; while it is contrary to etiquette to ask the visitor
any question as to whence he comes or whither he is going. Charity is
ready and universal ; housewives collect all their scraps for the poor, and
it is usual for the market people to deposit a trifle from their stock by the
"leper's walk" as they pass. Beggars are never refused, and in all these
respects Kabyle usage is substantially produced.

On the other hand, the aged parents are put on one side for the young,
the son's wife rides while the old mother walks behind — an outward and
visible sign of the abdication of the old couple, when the married heir has
succeeded to the post of working head of the family community. Sir
Charles Fellows found just the same counterpart to Basque usage in force
on the mainland. " When sons grow up and marry, the father gives over
to them his flocks and property, and trusts to his children's affection for
care in his declining years." 4

1 Cf. post, pp. 449, 489.

2 Syrisch-Romisches Rechlsbuch, s. 82.

3 Cecil Torr, Rhodes in Ancient Times, p. 72.

4 Account of Discoveries in Lycia, p. 241.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LAWS OF CHARONDAS.

THE remains of Cyclopean architecture to be found in Greece, Sardinia,
Sicily, and the Balearic Islands and Africa will perhaps in time furnish
data from which the affinities of their builders may be determined ; but
the results of archaeological inquiries in this direction are as yet hardly
precise enough to be utilized. The pre-Hellenic remains of Tiryns and
Mycenae, however, contribute one interesting fact bearing on the constitution
of the family. In the palaces recently excavated, the explorers were
perplexed by the discovery of, as it were, two houses side by side, on the
same plan, with little direct communication, the larger supposed to be for
men and the other for women. This has been a puzzle to scholars, as
there is no trace of such a separation in the Homeric family. But if these
buildings are the work of Pelasgian or Cario-Lycian stocks, it would be less
perplexing. The separate women's apartments might be a survival from
the time when the wife was " lady of the house," and the husband only
visited her. And in that case it would point to a period of transitional
usage, when the high-born wife came to dwell with her husband on con-
dition of his providing her with a sort of separate establishment, and from
that point, of view the completeness of the architectural isolation of the two
sets of rooms would cease to be surprising. It is still said to be the rule in
Greece for the house intended to be occupied by a young married couple,
to belong to the bride, and it is her father's business to provide one.

The influence of Egyptian art in the decorations of Mycenae must be
taken in connection with the traces of similar influence in comparatively
remote parts of Asia Minor, and we should argue from it rather to the wide
diffusion of a kind of cosmopolitan commerce than to any specially close
connection between Greece and Egypt, or even any specially close media-
tion on the part of Phosnicians between them. The Shardana, mentioned
among the peoples of the sea, whose incursions were repelled from Egypt
by Rameses III., have been identified with Sardinians, and the name is
probably one of the many which mark the advance of kindred stocks from
Asia Minor to the west. But it is one thing to conjecture an etymological
relation between the names of Sardis or Sargalossus and Sardinians or
Shardana, and another to suppose the same people to occupy the Lydian
capital, to invade Egypt, and to build the nuraghs.

The resemblances in name, architecture, and social institutions which at
one moment seem so close as to invite exaggeration, at the next almost

446 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

elude inquiry and tempt to an equally exaggerated scepticism ; and for the
present the safe and scientific course seems to be to note the parallelisms
of all kinds as they occur, while holding the judgment in suspense as to
the final inferences to be drawn from them.

The commonest type of nuragh is a tower in the form of a truncated
cone, ending probably with a terrace. The stones are sometimes rude,
sometimes worked and in regular courses, especially on the interior, but
laid without mortar. The inner chambers are beehive-shaped, the larger
ones being surrounded with wings or recesses like side chapels. Some
have two stories, with spiral staircases. They have been used as quarries
for centuries, yet La Marmora counted remains of more than 3,000 of them.
It is supposed that the largest nuraghs consisted of a turreted wall enclosing
a court in the centre of which was another still stronger, two-storied tower.
The most plausible conjecture as to their purpose is that they served as
fortresses where the dwellers in huts could take refuge with their cattle
from attacks. In one case a whole camp could have been formed under
cover of a score of towers surrounding a plateau ; and the main difference
between these defences and the typical Carian walls is that in Sardinia the
tower seems to have been sometimes considered sufficient by itself.

The island of Pantellaria, between Sardinia and the African coast, has
similar towers, and the so-called talayots 1 of the Balearic Isles, though as
a rule less well preserved, have the same general character. The photo-
graphs given in M. E. Cartailhac's work not only give a better idea than
any description of individual monuments, but also suggest that the ruined
" cities" of surprising number and extent which he explored may have
resembled those of the Canary Islands, where, it is said, the natives of Hierro
lived in large circular enclosures, containing about twenty families, sur-
rounded by walls of dry stones. When the walls can be traced (especially
in Minorca, where the stone gives an inferior lime and so has not been used
for burning to the same extent), they form irregular polygons, sometimes,
but rarely, with towers at the angles, and every such town includes one or
more talayots, though there are also more detached talayots than there can
possibly have been towns. Besides the few larger buildings, of which por-
tions remain standing, the ground of the enclosures is strewn with stones,
such as might have been used for dwelling-huts. The very uselessness of
the erections, which perplexes the archaeologist, is a proof that it must be
a survival from some former state of things in which the sacred or secular
purpose was more direct.

The ancient wells, called potarrds, also probably owe their origin to the
same generation of colonists as that which made the katabothras of the
Cephissus. One was said, before it became choked with rubbish, to have
water at a depth of 32 metres, reached by 137 steps, with massive pillars
and rails, hewn in the solid rock.2 Artificial grottos, clearly for funeral

1 The local name atalaya or talaya is derived from an Arab word meaning watch
or look-out. (E. Cartailhac, Monuments primitifs des lies Baleares, 1892, p. 23.)

2 Jb., p. 39.

THE LAWS OF CHARONDAS. 447

uses, are found, with the gradual descending and vertical shaft of Phoe-
nician tombs, which seemed to follow Egyptian models.

Towers, called truddhu, similar to the nuraghs, are still built and used in
Apulia, and, though they now only serve to shelter the cultivators when
away from home during the summer months, they imitate older specchie
or watch towers, the ruins of which abound. The ancient population here
consisted of lapygians and Messapians, civilized comparatively late from
Tarentum. The nuraghs seem to have been built by colonists entering the
island from the west, and driving the wild aborigines before them, to the
mountains which run down the centre of the island ; and it is suggested l
that the towers were meant to afford protection against their raids, when
the builders were compelled to retreat from the coast, before the aggressions
of Phoenician traders or Carthaginian conquerors.

If the towers had been intended to serve against the Carthaginians,
they would not, as is actually the case, have been planted most thickly
in the centre of the island. The resemblances between them and the
talayots of the Balearic Islands is consistent with a theory that the authors
of both may have immigrated from Africa. From Crete to Cyrene is a
shorter stage on the westward route than from Albania to the heel of the
Italian boot ; and the absence of inviting halting-places between Tripoli
and Carthage would cause the north coast of Tunis and Algiers to be
occupied by the earliest race of colonists before Sardinia, and perhaps
Malta, was likely to be approached from settlements in Sicily or Italy.
It is therefore possible that the nuragh-building population was Iberian 2
or Libyan rather than Pelasgic, in which case one would be tempted to
regard the remains at Lixus as pre-Phcenician. And Diodorus' description
of the sole possessions of the Libyan chiefs, " towers built near the water
supply where they keep their provisions," would no doubt illustrate the
use made of the island towers as well.

The same type of primitive fortification extends as far as the range
claimed by Strabo for the laws of Charondas ; and we may therefore regard
it as possible that the laws of the Mazaceni really had points in common
with those of the legendary lawgivers of Greece and Italy. The Locrians,
whose approach to the Lycian rule of descent has been referred to already,
are said to have been the first people to commit their laws to writing ; and
the same story is told of a period of strife and confusion preceding the
legislation of Zaleucus— to whom the first code is attributed — as of the
disorders in Sparta before Lycurgus.

According to Ephorus, these written laws were founded upon the Cretan,
Lacedaemonian, and Areopagitic codes, and the relation between these laws
and those of Charondas is indicated in the tradition which, regardless of
chronology, makes the latter legislator a disciple of Zaleucus. According
to Aristotle, Charondas was a native of Catana, and made laws for his

1 Hist, of Art, iv. p. 105 ff.

2 The modern Sards are said by some ethnologists to be the purest representatives of
the Iberian type.

448 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

own and the other cities of Chalcidian origin in Sicily and Italy. There
is nothing but the laws attributed to them to bear witness for the historical
existence of either of these legislators ; and it is probable that in this case,
as in that of Lycurgus, the antiquity of the laws has been under-estimated,
while the popular fancy was engaged in inventing a legendary personality
for the lawgiver.

Zaleucus was supposed to have flourished in the yth cent. B.C., and
any way the reputation of Locrian law and justice was established
before the time of Pindar. Plato more than once speaks of the Locrian
cities as the best governed in Italy, and the Locrian code remained in
force for what, according to Greek standards, appeared a long time.
Locrian songs had a reputation for licentiousness, and the luxuriousness,
to which the decay of the Graeco-Italian cities was attributed, included
great laxity in the sexual relations, or else the marriage law in force was
one which left the conduct of women virtually unrestrained. Athenagus
says of the Tyrrhenians that women were common, and children brought
up without regard to their parentage ; l and, though this would not be a fair
account of the whole custom of the country, it represents the impression
made, upon men of another type of civilization, by certain phases of
custom in which Lycian and Lydian usage touch.

Fathers, however, were neither unknown nor unvenerated. Tombs
possessed at Sybaris the same right of asylum as temples in Crete and
Egypt ; and it was alleged, as an instance of Sybarite impiety, that a father's
tomb proved a safer asylum than a temple. It is significant, as far as it
goes, that the names both of the mother and of the maternal grandmother
are known, in the case of the Locrian poetess Nossis (a lady whose frag-
ments were admired by Bentley), though there is no mention of her
paternal ancestors.

Aristotle asserts the institution of common meals to have been even
more ancient in QEnotria than in Crete or Lacedsemon, which probably
means that his inquiries led him to believe it to have existed in Italy,
before the date commonly assigned to Lycurgus. And it must any way
have been included among the laws of Zaleucus and Charondas. The
Locrians were not allowed to sell their ancestral plots, except on the
plea, which it is still necessary to allege in China, of extreme poverty.
The laws did not, so far as we know, prohibit slavery ; but it is said that
in early times no slaves were employed by either Locrians or Phocians,
all needful work being done by poor freemen.2 Precise penalties were
assigned in the code for each offence, and a separate penalty for perjury
or false witness ; higher fines were imposed on the rich than on the poor
for the neglect of civic duties ; the law gave no assistance to creditors in
recovering debts ; those who sold had to choose between transactions for
cash and upon honour.

Ephorus praised Zaleucus for simplifying the law of contracts, but it

1 DeipnosophistS) xii. c. 14.

2 Grote, Hist. Greece, vol. ii. p. 392. Cf. the account of theNabataeans,/^, p. 512.

THE LAWS OF CHARONDAS. 449

does not appear whether this was the simplification in question. Theo-
phrastus l mentions the law against credit as a point upon which Plato and
Charondas were agreed, and adds some particulars, which are clearly
authentic and not unlike the law of Rhodes. The buyer was to give
earnest to the seller, and a piece of money to three neighbours, who were
to remember and bear witness to the bargain.2 The earnest was forfeited
unless the whole of the price was paid the same day, while if the vendor
did not stand to his bargain, he was liable to a fine equal to the price
agreed on.

All the children of the citizens were required to learn to write, and the
master's salary was paid by the city, as is still the case in Kabyle com-
munes. A fine was said to be imposed on those who kept bad company,
and this may very possibly point to an arrangement like the Chinese
system of mutual responsibility, by which associated groups shared the
penalties incurred by any one of their members. The law by which
orphans were committed to their mother's kin for the guardianship of their
persons, and their father's kin for that of their property, seems to belong
to a transitional period like that of the Gortyn code ; and the same may be
said of the provision by which the next of kin was entitled to marry an
orphan girl, and obliged, if he did not marry her himself, to give her 500
drachms as a dowry. It is said that this law was altered into one compel-
ling the kinsman to marry the orphan in any case himself; but Greek
codes usually limit themselves to regulating the marriages of heiresses in
the interest of the kinsmen, while here the intention is clearly to provide
for the establishment of orphans without property.

Two laws ascribed to Charondas, on the subject of marriage, gave rise to
numerous witticisms. He is said to have deprived men who married again
of their civil rights, or made them incompetent to hold office in the State ;
and a former freedom of divorce was said to be restricted by a law forbid-
ding a divorced husband or wife to marry again any one younger than their
former spouse. We have seen that laws or customs acting virtually in
restraint of second marriages did prevail in some of the Hamitic stocks,
when the husband endowed his wife for the benefit of his children, or when
the family property was transmitted through the mother. It is also clear
that when, as in Egypt, office may be inherited, or held, in virtue of a
wife's descent, it would be vacated if the husband, on her death, married
again so as to found another family. The Greek and Latin epigrams,
which represent the lawgiver as thinking a man must be too foolish to
govern the State if, after one escape, he submitted again to the bonds
of wedlock, clearly rest on misunderstanding ; but they may have been
suggested in part by rules like those of Marseilles concerning the timuchi,3
as well as by the unfamiliar restraints imposed on marriage by the rights of

1 All that is known from classical sources about the laws of Zaleucus and Charondas
will be found towards the end of Bentley's Dissertation upon Phalaris. ( Works, i. 376-41 7. )

2 Cf. the "three adult witnesses " required to validate several transactions under the
Gortyn Code, post, p. 477, 8. 3 Post, p. 452t

P.C. G G

450 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

children and the prevalence of inheritance through women. The other
statement may refer to restrictions on the right of divorce imposed to pre-
vent injustice to an aged consort, as the Chinese forbid the husband to
divorce a wife, whom he married when poor, or who has shared his mourn-
ing for parents.

Sumptuary laws and one prohibiting residence in foreign countries are
ascribed to the same source. The Rhegians of Italy, who followed the
laws of Charondas, were described as having an aristocratic Government,
" for a thousand men, chosen out according to their estates, managed
everything/' till a Messanian made himself tyrant.1

The authenticity of the section in the Politics which says there is nothing
remarkable in the laws of Charondas, except the law about false witness,
has been disputed, and the expression of opinion counts for nothing if it is
not Aristotle's. The interpolation, however, if it be one, adds another
link to the chain connecting the legislation of Italy and Asia Minor. It
states that Androdamas of Rhegium gave laws to the Chalcidians of Thrace,
relating partly to homicide and partly to heiresses ; and as laws relating to
heiresses are a very important and characteristic feature in the customary
codes of the pre-Hellenic Mediterranean people, the pseudo-Aristotle may
be believed, both as to the presence of this element in the so-called laws
of Charondas, and to the prevalence of similar laws on both sides of the
Adriatic.

Aristotle's own fine sense of what is really characteristic has preserved a
word, nearly as significant as a law, used by Charondas to describe the
members of the family, which shows that less importance was attached to
genealogies in these communities than to the actual association of the
household. Those who ate together, " the companions of the cupboard,"
were the domestic unit, as the Arabs hold that the name of son cannot be
withheld from him, who from infancy has shared the " morning draught "
of the household's head.2

Strabo's statement respecting the Mazaceni has been quoted already,
and there is no difficulty in supposing Leuco-Syrian custom and Ala-
rodian speech to have followed the same two lines of march as the alterna-
tive types of coin and weights which can be traced.3 Pelasgian was still
spoken in the time of Herodotus, in two towns on the Hellespont, and was
pronounced by him, like the language of the Carians, a barbarous, i.e. a non-
Hellenic tongue. But the same language was spoken in these towns and
at Creston, or Croton, a Tyrrhenian settlement on the Thermaic Gulf, so
that in this case we find kindred language and kindred institutions spread-
ing along the same lines.

Cyzicus on the Propontis, the modern Artaki, was a Pelasgian settle-
ment, said to have been subsequently occupied by Milesians from
Crete ; so that the resemblance noted between the city and its institutions,

1 Bentley, Works, i. 402.

2 Prof. W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in early Arabia, p. 115-

3 Cf. App. E., Metric Systems of Babylonia and Egypt.

THE LAWS OF CHARONDAS. 451

and those of Rhodes, Carthage, and Marseilles, is perfectly intelligible.
The city had three storehouses, one for arms, one for engines, and one
for corn ; 1 it employed three architects, who were presumably connected
with some threefold division of the town, like that which characterized
Etruscan municipalities, and it would be hard to imagine what other stock
than the one we are tracking could so early have produced a city in this
region qualified to rival in its size, beauty, and the excellence of its admin-
istration, any of the most celebrated towns of Asia.2 As in the case of
Tyre and other capitals of the pacific trading race, the chief military inci-
dent in its history is a siege, ending in the discomfiture of Mithridates ;
and it was one of the cities whose liberties were respected by the Romans.

In general, when it is said of any people, as of the Caunians, that " they
follow their own laws and customs," or are " governed by ancient usage,"
there is a presumption that they belong to the ancient, wide-spread stock
which was chiefly remarkable for having very many and peculiar ancient
customs, and for adhering to them with exceptional persistence. One of
these customs was that of paying debts without compulsion, and it is not a
little curious to find that this habit was shared in the Homeric age by the
magnanimous Caucones, whose origin and end is buried in the same ob-
scurity as that of the Pelasgi and Leleges. Athena, in the person of Men-
tor, informs Nestor that he is on his way to that people to collect a large
and by no means recent debt, and therefore cannot await the arrival of
Telemachus.

An amusing comment on this undertaking from the Greek point of view
has been added to the text of Strabo. It is argued that the Caucones
must have dwelt in a different direction from that which Telemachus and
Nestor's son would take. Otherwise it was natural for any one desiring to
recover a debt from a people under Nestor's command to have appealed
to him for help, " in case, as usually happens, they should be disposed to
repudiate the contract." The poet of the Odyssey evidently knew what he
was talking about, and had better ground than the commentator suspected
for the choice of the incident. Even now a loan " not of small amount
or recent date" will be voluntarily repaid by a Berber, as soon as he is able
to do so, and, so far from refusing to discharge the debt when called on, he
will actually take a long journey to bring the money to his creditor.3

That these scrupulous debtors should belong to the same race as the
Locrians, who would not allow debts to be recovered by law, may seem im-
probable, yet the fact, if it be one, would admit of an easy psychological

1 Strabo, xii. viii. § II. It was part of the business of the agoranomi of Halicarnassus
to provide for an abundant supply of wheat at reasonable prices. (Anc. Greek Inscr.,
Pt. iv. p. 78.)

2 Strabo, viii. iii. § II, 17.

3 The modern Egyptians have the same kind of scrupulosity. Professor Sayce had left
some money with a native to execute a commission ; he was unable to do so, and the
money was returned, passing from hand to hand down the Nile, and reaching its destin-
ation safely. (Alone through Syria, Introd. p. x.) Mr. Flinders Petrie finds the work-
men employed in his excavations equally exact and trustworthy in money matters.
(Medum, 1892.) Cf. also/<?j/, p. 540.

452 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

explanation, In a commercial community it is desirable that money due
for value received should be paid at once, i.e. that cash transactions should
be the rule, When credit is the rule, cases of two kinds arise, in which
repayment becomes difficult : (i) if the bargain has been unequal, and the
sum to be repaid exceeds the value given ; and (2) if the debtor has
promised more than he is able to perform without injury. If the State
enforces the payment of debts in any case, it must do so in all ; and if it
enforces payment in either of these cases, it protects the speculative trader,
who makes a business of seducing the poor into bad bargains, and so
encourages a purely predatory form of enterprise.

On the other hand, if the poor are free to repudiate what the Irish law
used to call " bad contracts," the rich will not enter into them, and so the
habit of wishing to repudiate contracts will not be formed. Loans which
have benefited the borrower, so that they can be repaid without suffering,
will not be repudiated ; because custom and public opinion would condemn
the ingratitude, and because it is against the general interest to discourage
beneficial lending ; and the same consideration applies to debts on account
of goods worth the price for which credit has been given. A trader, who
repudiates just debts because the law fails to enforce their payment, incurs
the fitting and sufficient penalty of being unable to obtain goods unless
paid for in advance. In China, where there is no legal redress of wrongs
by civil process, this natural sanction is found efficacious ; and if Locrian
anarchy was favourable to Cauconian morality, it must have been for the
same reason.

Whether the Phoceeans who founded Massalia were akin to the Locri,
who colonized (Enotria, or not, the people they found in possession appar-
ently belonged to the same generation of colonists as the Cantabri, and the
two elements in the historical population had amalgamated into a homo-
geneous whole. The names of Amphissa and Naupactus take us back to a
time which Ephorus rightly supposes to have been earlier than the Herac-
lidae, when the Locrians were shipbuilders, and Locris occupied by the
pre-Hellenic Pelasgi, or Leleges ; and the institutions of Marseilles, to-
gether with its resemblance to Cyzicus and Rhodes, strengthen the pre-
sumption in favour of its owing its origin, at least in part, to a similar
stock.

To be eligible for the council of the Timuchi it was necessary for a
man to have children and to be descended for three generations through
full citizens. The laws of the Massalians, according to Strabo, were ex-
pounded in public, and " were the same as those of the lonians," presum-
ably those of Asia, whose laws are nowhere described, though they must
have retained strong traces of Lycian or Amazonian custom, as several of
their cities, like Ephesus and Miletus, had been formerly occupied by
Leleges, and again by Carians or Cretans.1

1 Curtius (Hist, of Greece, Eng. tr., i. p. 65) comments on "the fact that this early
civilization of the Asiatic tribes was from the first akin to, and homogeneous with, what
was universally called Ionic."

THE LAWS OF CHARONDAS. 453

One of the laws of Marseilles, limiting the amount of dowries, is prob-
ably an indirect evidence of the former prevalence of such customs, for it
would be unnecessary to forbid fathers to give large portions to their
daughters unless they had been in the habit of doing so.1 The largest
dowries permitted consisted of TOO gold pieces, with five more for dress
and for ornaments. Similar laws were passed in Crete, where they had
doubtless the same significance, marking a deliberate transition, from the
customs of an earlier race, transmitting property through daughters, to
those of the later political stock, who invented paternal power and the
tutelage of women. The special and distinct allowance for dress and or-
naments is clearly a survival from customs of the old Egyptian and modern
Malabar type.

Curiously enough, the only exact counterpart to the £00 3 Timuchi of
Marseilles is to be found in the l( Six Hundreds "of Malabar, of which
mention is made in the earliest deeds surviving in the country,, and
commonly assigned to the 8th or gth centuries A. D. ; and as in
Malabar traces survive of the sexagesimal system peculiar to the ancient
Babylonians, it is not impossible that this number represents a more archaic
tradition than the more usual number of three or one hundred. In Strabo's
time the natives of the city were devoted tq the study of philosophy and
letters, and he singles out for admiration the extent to which their laws
and customs had been imitated by the surrounding barbarians. The
Romans in this case also permitted the city to retain its freedom and to
govern itself by its own ancient laws, a concession which, here as else-
where, may have been due in part to the political indifferentism of Hamitic
and Alarodian States, which prevented any danger of conspiracy against
the sovereignty of Rome, as well as in part to a just appreciation of the
excellence of the local government spared.

The laws of Charondas may represent one aspect or development of
primitive Leuco-Syrian or Alarodian custom. But the Amazons of legend
and the Iberians of history have an equal claim to count in the same
family, and it is not till all the suggestions, of undoubtedly archaic usage
with this parentage have been brought together that the question of the
pre-Hellenic affinities of Cretan and Spartan law and custom can be even
raised with plausibility. Ancient and modern Iberian custom are best con-
sidered before the Dorian and Syrian laws, which are chronologically older
than any authentic records of the former, because no one will suppose the
archaic features in Georgian or Basque custom to be modern inventions ;
while anything in them that is at once really ancient and sociologically akin
to the archaic survivals in the Gortyn and Syro-Roman code, must stand to
the latter in an elder-brotherly relation,

1 It is noticeable that marriage contracts were registered publicly at Myconos (Recueil,
i. p. 61) as sales and mortgages of land were at Tenos, probably because charges for
dowries ranked with mortgages ; while it was important to purchasers to be able to
ascertain whether any piece of land was thus burdened or not.

2 Cf., however, Recueil, i. p. 176, for the same number a,s the limit to a judicial
tribunal.

CHAPTER V.

LEGENDARY AMAZONS AND HISTORICAL IBERIANS.

MIGRATION towards the West followed several distinct lines, and alongside
of or before the movement which ended at Marseilles, there was one of
which the traces are still more curious and interesting. The identification
of Basques and Georgians as members of the same strange linguistic family
would dispel any remaining doubt as to the kinship between the Iberians
of Transcaucasia and those of Spain, and the customs of both also agree
in belonging to the same sociological family, which may be called the
Lycian. The historical customs of Lycians and Iberians seem between
them, to have produced the Amazon legend, and as some characteristic
Iberian customs have lasted down to the present day, it will be convenient
to dispose of the legend first.

According to Ephorus the Amazons dwelt between Mysia, Caria and
Lydia, near Cyme, — Ephesus and Smyrna, as well as that town, being
called after members of the race.1 Strabo notices as singular the fact that
ancient and modern writers agree as to the existence of Amazons,2 though
they differ as to the localities occupied by them. Theophanes, who
accompanied Pompey in his campaigns, mentions Amazons and Albanians
bordering upon Scythian tribes, while other writers locate the Amazons at
the foot of the Caucasus. If we try to define the classical idea of the
tribes thus named, it would probably mean a warlike body not merely
governed by, but consisting exclusively of women, who bring up the
daughters born from temporary unions effected under treaty with men of
adjoining tribes.

Fortunately we are able to measure exactly the discrepancy between fact
and fiction in regard to a mediaeval myth concerning, an " Island of women "
off the coast of India, propagated by Chinese and Mahomedan travellers
as well as by Marco Polo. The legend in this case may be controlled by
a British Government report upon the island of Minicoy, which is doubtless
the original of Marco's Female Island ; and it is a fair inference that the
version of the Amazon legend given by Strabo may have a corresponding
substratum of fact. The two passages can be read in parallel columns, and
it will be seen that everything except the account of the warlike habits of
the women is the same in both : the justification of Marco's story will be
found below.

1 Strabo, xii. iii. 21. 2 lb., xi. v. 3.

AMAZONS AND IBERIANS. 455

Every year when the month of March When at home, they are occupied in

arrives, the men all set out for the other performing with their own hands the

island, and tarry there for three months — work of ploughing, planting, pasturing

to wit, March, April, May — dwelling with cattle, and particularly in training horses,

their wives for that space. At the end of They pass two months of the spring on

those three months they return to their own a neighbouring mountain, which is the

island, and pursue their husbandry and boundary between them and the Gargar-

trade for the other nine months. . . . enses. The latter also ascend the moun-

As for the children which their wives bear tain according to some ancient custom for

to them, if they be girls, they abide with the purpose of performing common sacri-

their mothers ; but if they be boys, the fices and of having intercourse with the

mothers bring them up till they are four- women with a view to offspring in secret

teen, and then send them to their fathers. and darkness. The female children that

Such is the custom of these two islands. may be born are retained by the Amazons

The wives do nothing but nurse their themselves, but the males are taken to the

children and gather such fruits as the Gargarenses to be brought up. The

island produces ; for their husbands do children are distributed among families,

furnish them with all necessaries. x in which the master treats them as his

own, it being impossible to ascertain the
contrary.2

Strabo's description is intended to apply to Amazons of Ceraunia in the
Caucasus, but the same names as well as the same people reappear in
Thessaly ; and if the traditions respecting them have any historical value at
all, it would follow that Amazons were nurtured in the mountains of Taurus
and Caucasus, that they occupied, but failed to maintain themselves on
the open sea-board (as at Themiscyra, called the Plain of the Amazons),
and that when driven thence, they passed into Greece, Thessaly, and
Thrace. The identification of the comparatively rude tribes to whom the
name was applied in later ages with the people of legendary fame probably
rested in part on a real tradition of their origin and migrations, as well as
upon their retention of peculiar customs. What Strabo says of the
Iberians of Transcaucasia in his own time 3 applied no doubt to the
Amazons of Themiscyra and Lydia. And the description of the dress of
the pacific Ib'erians points to their relationship with the pre-Semitic
Armenians and Medes, who are now commonly affiliated to the ancient
white race of Finno-Ugric speech.

The legend of the race of fighting women current among the Greeks
was probably compounded out of true stories of tribes in which women
rode and fought with men, and of tribes in which women sometimes ruled,
and always enjoyed complete personal independence, and were in no way
under the control of the fathers of their children. The first trait would be
most common among the wilder mountain tribes,4 and lends itself most to
picturesque exaggeration, but it is by the other that the Amazons of fable
connect themselves with the Lycians of history and the many other
detached stocks, from the Egyptians to the Basques, from the peaceful

1 Sir Henry Yule's Marco Polo, 2nd edit., vol. ii. pp. 395, 6.

2 Strabo, ix. v. 2.

8 " The plain is occupied by those who are most inclined to agriculture and peace.
Their dress is after the Armenian and Median fashion. Those who inhabit the mountain-
ous country are given to war, and live like the Sarmatians and Scythians, on whose
country they border, and with whom they are connected by affinity of race." (/£. , xi.
iii. 3.)

4 /£., xi. v. 3-8.

456 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

islanders of Minicoy to the wild Towarek tribes, — who have appeared to
their neighbours to be under the government of women.

The ancient Albanians were noted for their respect for old age and for
the dead, for their simplicity and " Cyclopean mode of life," for religious
worship akin to that of Cappadocia, and for the multiplicity of their
tongues.1 The customs of the modern Albanians, — whose connection with
their namesakes is as much matter of controversy as that between the
Iberians, — retain traces of two distinct and characteristic usages of the
archaic type with which we are concerned ; namely, companionships of the
sort anciently connected with the system of common meals ; and the two
stages in the marriage contract, of which betrothal is the first and author-
izes connubial intercourse, while the wife is not brought to her husband's
house till the end of the first year of marriage.

Troops of youths, like the Cretan ageltz, were formed at Elbassan, of
twenty-five or thirty members of the same age and calling. The comrade-
ship usually began during adolescence ; each member paid a fixed sum
into a common fund held by an elected president, who invests the money
and renders accounts, spending the interest on two or three annual feasts
generally held out of doors. The bond of comradeship is very strong, and
companies are often not dissolved till the members are fifty ; then each
receives back his entrance money. Von Hahn, who gives these particu-
lars,2 also noted that clans and families were closely organized, and the
former exogamous, like the Chinese sing. As a rule, somewhat more
respect is shown for the mother than the father.

On the subject of the interval between the betrothal and the leading
home of the bride, Miss Garnett adds : " A romantic reserve surrounds
the interviews between the young couple (among the Albanians of the
hills), who, especially if the husband be one of a numerous family, and
have no private apartments, can only meet in secret till they have children
of their own. The mountaineers cherish this custom." 3 The Northern
Albanians and Tosks treat women with great consideration, and " they are
often entrusted with negotiations for truce or peace," because they can
traverse the camps of belligerents with greater safety than men, just as
among the Iberians of ancient Spain.

The inference is plain that the laws and customs of the Amazonian
ancestors of these mountaineers belonged to the same family as Spartan,
Kabyle, and Basque usage.

Parts of Asia Minor, which have long lapsed into rudeness and
obscurity, possessed a considerable degree of culture and wealth, when
this race was in the ascendant there. Phasis on the Black Sea was an
important spot, merchandize from Babylonia and India passing through
Armenia, as well as through Media, to the Caspian. Trade and industry
were developed to an extent unequalled in modern times, and the adjoin-
ing Colchians not merely resembled the Egyptians in their life and

1 Strabo, xi. v. 3-8. 2 Albanesische Studien, p. 168.

3 The Women of Turkey and their Folklore, pt. ii. p. 257.

AMAZONS AND IBERIANS. 457

manufactures, but had their ports frequented by traders and travellers, to
whom Egypt was sufficiently familiar for comparison. The people of
Phasis were also noted for their hospitality towards shipwrecked persons,
whom they provided with provisions for the way, and three minas before
shipping them off.1

Strabo's description of the Iberian constitution seems almost as if it had
been inspired by the accounts of Egypt; but other characteristic details are
evidently genuine, so that on the whole he must be counted as an inde-
pendent witness in favour of a real resemblance. According to him, the
inhabitants of the country were divided into four classes : the common
people, who do all the servile work ; the soldiers and husbandmen ; the
priests, who adjudicate in disputes with neighbouring peoples ; and the first
and chief class, from which the kings and priests are appointed. The king
was not the son, but the eldest relation of his predecessor; and, as in Carth-
age, Sparta, and many other States of this order, the royal orifice is in a way
duplicated, the administration of justice and the command of the army
being in the hands of another member of the royal family.

The concluding paragraph in the same book 2 respecting the dedication
of Armenian virgins to the temple of the goddess Anaitis ought very pos-
sibly to be interpreted also by the light of an archaic state of the marriage
laws, rather than as an example of sensuality in religious rites. Strabo
refers as a parallel to the license of the unmarried women in Lydia,
described by Herodotus, and adds : " they treat their lovers with great
kindness, they entertain them hospitably, and frequently make a return of
more presents than they receive,3 being amply supplied with means de-
rived from their wealthy connections. They do not admit chance strangers
into their dwellings, but prefer those of a rank equal to their own."

Herodotus is not so circumstantial, but he also implies that, among the
Lydians, women had property of their own, and he expressly states " that
they are wont to contract themselves." Now European travellers, when
brought in contact with any genuine survival of archaic gynaecocracy, like
that of the Nairs or Towareks, are always struck by the liberty of the women
as a kind of organized license. The marriage law of the Nairs differs
scarcely at all from that of Islam, except that the right of polygamy and
of divorce at will are possessed under it by women instead of by men ;
yet it is habitually described as a system of concubinage, though in
practice both polygamy and divorce are far less frequent than in Maho-
medan communities. Strabo's statement would apply to the Nair women
who own property, eschew mesalliances, and have indefinite liberty of
divorce. And as a matter of fact, monogamy was invented, with the
progress of civilization, in communities originally subject to the so-called
mother-law ; and when the invention was perfected, the women, whose

1 B. Blichsenschiitz, Besitz und Erwerb im Gritchischen Altherthume. p. 428.

2 xi. 14, § 16.

3 According to Codrington (Pacific Islands, p. 24), it was necessary to use the peri-
phrasis, "a woman who gives money " (to her paramours), to denote one who made a
profession of licentiousness.

458 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

pristine license it appears to restrict, are nevertheless its most attached and
faithful guardians.

According to the Description of Georgia by Prince Vakhushta (who
died in 1770), the ancient religion of the Georgians was "to believe in one
God and swear by the tomb of Karthlos ; " l and he instances among their
characteristics that they " keep their word and marry one wife of rank
equal to their own." 2 Traditions of the practice of cannibalism and of
marriages within unlawful degrees lingered vaguely, but were attributed to
the influence of savage neighbours. The dead were mourned in sack-
cloth, and for a year the bereaved fasted from wine and meat. Hospitality
and respect for the aged were universal.

Early in the eighteenth century a collection of Georgian laws was edited
by a Prince Vakhtang,3 which includes codes going back to the fourteenth
century. The following provisions resemble those of the Syrian and
Gortyn codes. In addition to graduated fines for the infliction of personal
injuries of various kinds, the offender is required to pay the medical ex-
penses of his victim, as by Rhodian and Chinese law. A wife abandoned
without good reason by her husband was entitled to receive half the price
of blood, or, in substance, an indemnity like that promised in Egyptian
and other marriage contracts ; the wife was liable for a similar payment
under the same conditions, which is an indication that the proprietary
position of the two consorts was approximately equal.

If a son, who had taken possession of the family property, refused to
support his aged father, the father had the right to dispose as he pleased
of his own earnings. This provision is at once a very interesting proof of
the habit of abdication by the father on the approach of age, and of the
closeness of the family partnership ; for it would appear that, if the father
received due maintenance, after he had made over the headship of the
family to his son, his own personal acquisitions would go, like the earnings
of younger sons, into the common fund. The sanctity of tombs was
protected by the infliction of a fine for their violation, equal to twice the
blood money of the person of highest rank in the tomb. Witnesses were
not required to swear, but, as in the Syrian code, they had to "satisfy so
many conditions of probity and impartiality " that such evidence could
rarely be given.

1 The question, Can this name have anything to do with the tutelary spirits of the
ancient Armenians, called Khaldis ? has been asked above. The succession to the throne
was limited to the royal family, but was not strictly hereditary ; the eldest son, or the
most capable might succeed, or the late king's brother, or even his daughter in default of
males. Queens are rather common in Georgian history and legend ; a Queen Tamara,
who flourished in the twelfth century, is the most conspicuous figure in the national
legends and all important monuments, of whatsoever date, are attributed to her. The
Description includes a long list of the royal officers, all of whom were held responsible
for preserving the ancient customs of the country.

2 Description Geographique de la Georgie par le Tzarevitch Wakhoticht, published,
with a French translation, by M. Brosset (1842), p. 7.

3 Journal des Savants, 1887, pp. 164 and 278. The following particulars are borrowed
from a review by M. Dareste of a Russian work on contemporary custom and primitive
law by M. Kovalevski (1886).

AMAZONS AND IBERIANS. 459

The code of Vakhtang refers to the ancient custom of brothers living
in community, but it gives the support of the law to those who desired to
separate their interests from those of the group. Illegitimate sons were
not entitled to share in the division of property,1 but their brothers were
bound to receive them as serfs, and they were commonly provided for by
an allotment of land. The amount chargeable as accumulated interest was
at one time limited to 20 per cent. The code of Vakhtang declared that
excessive interest had been claimed upon loans, and fixed the lawful rate
at 12 per cent., adding, however, that those who do not care about their
souls may charge 18, 24, or even 30 per cent. ; but compound interest was
forbidden, and the interest was in no case to exceed the principal — a limit
which is only to be met with in Egypt, China, and one or two undoubted
branches of the Hamitic stock. The reckoning of the rate of interest by
steps of six is also noteworthy.

Family estates were not allowed to be sold to pay the debts of indivi-
duals, and according to Vakhtang, real property must not be given as
security for a loan. M. Dareste supposes the reason to be that land, for
instance, belongs to a whole family and cannot be alienated, even for a
time ; but the prohibition is particularly interesting as showing that anti-
chretic pledges had been in use before. Unmarried daughters had a
right to dowry and maintenance, and the needful expenditure for this pur-
pose formed a first charge upon a debtor's property, a characteristic illus-
tration at once of the regard for women and of the feeling that no contract
or legal obligation could justify the ruining of one man or family for the
enrichment of another.

The modern Suanes, whose Platonic interest in the theory of government
has been mentioned before, have retained one of the archaic features of
ancient city life. Their villages " lie in clusters of two or four and go by
a collective name, distinct from the individual appellation of each knot of
houses."2 In the same district girls were noticed taking part with boys, in
a rough, fighting game, and dances of a barbaric kind were popular.

The whole country between the Black and the Caspian Sea abounds in
remains of former culture and civilization of a comparatively advanced
character. Rock dwellings and inscriptions as well as bronze remains of
all periods abound, and it is a tradition that the now unlettered Georgians
were formerly fond of learning. Like Mesopotamia itself, the country only
requires irrigation to produce the utmost fertility, and remains of aqueducts
and irrigation works abound on a scale testifying to the wealth and power
of the rulers by whom they were carried out. The difference between the
ancient and modern condition of the country cannot be accounted for by
changes in the population, for it is evident from Strabo's account that the
ancient Soanes and other tribes were quite as savage as any of their descen-
dants, at the time when Phasis and Cyzicus were still marts of world-wide

1 This provision is not usual, and seems to imply that such sons did or had formerly
claimed to share.

2 Freshfield, The Central Caucasus and Bashan, p. 298.

460 FROM MASS A LI A TO MALABAR.

fame. The legendary renown of Colchis shows that civilization was
developed in this region contemporaneously, let us say, with the palmy
days of Carchemish and Sidon. And the importance of modern survivals
of ancient custom, here, lies in the fact that the modem tribes are of the
same material as those out of whom famous nations were made between
three and four thousand years ago.

Turning now towards the western line of Iberian migration, we find the
Basque and Tatar custom of the couvade existing, according to Diodorus,1
in Corsica, a natural halting-place on the way to Spain, where Etruscan
influence was at one time in the ascendant. He also praises the justice
and humanity of the natives, and notices their regard for the rights of pro-
perty. The sheep grazing upon unenclosed pastures were marked, and
the finder of wild honey had his title to it respected. In the Balearic Isles
women were highly prized, and three or four times as much would be paid
for the ransom of a woman as of a man ; notwithstanding which a bar-
barous marriage custom prevailed, which gave the bride to all the family
in order of seniority before the bridegroom. It seems probable that the
vague reports of the existence of the so-called droit de seigneur among the
Basques point to a survival of this kind of barbarism rather than to the
intrusion of feudal oppression.

Mention has been made already of the communism attributed to the
Tyrrhenians in regard to women and children, and the institution of com-
mon meals and common tillage, which lasted longer, seems to have spread
along the same line.8 Diodorus states that the most civilized people in
Northern Spain (the Vaccsei) used to divide the lands requiring cultivation,
and, after harvest, distrib ite the fruits, allotting to every one their share,
like the Chinese of the Chow Li. The more accessible and fertile pro-
vinces of Spain were occupied by skilled agriculturists ; in Turdetania
(Andalusia) trade and manufactures throve, and the silver mines were
drained in the most scientific manner.

The manners of the people were polished and urbane, and they ac-
quiesced first in the Phoenician and then in the Roman dominion, without
any material change in the national character, though the native language
was entirely superseded. The Lusitanjans were said to resemble the
Lacedaemonians in their use of oil, hot air and cold water baths ; and the
Iberian women were famous for their martial fury. But the different tribes
of the same race varied as much as those of the Caucasus in civilization
and pacific culture.

A passage of Strabo, descriptive of the marriage customs of the Cantabri,
enables us to recognise that people as certainly belonging to the group of
ancient nations in which women occupy the singular position characteristic
of Egypt and Lycia, and at the same time to identify the customs of the
modern Basques with those of the Cantabri. Strabo's statement is, that
among the Cantabri "men give dowries to their wives, and the daughters
are left heirs, but they procure wives for their brothers."3 And it would
1 v. xiv. 2 v. xxxiv. 3 iii. c. 4, § 1 8.

AMAZONS AND IBERIANS. 461

be difficult to describe more compendiously those customs in which the
Basques and the Egyptians resemble each other, and differ, as Herodotus
says of the latter, from all the rest of the world.

Some of the Basque districts have customary codes known to have
been reduced to writing as early as the i3th cent. A.D., and the ruling
principle in all of them, with regard to the transmission of property, may be
described briefly as primogeniture without distinction of sex. The family
property consists of the farm or homestead, which the household occupies
and cultivates. On marriage, the firstborn, heiress or heir, becomes co-
seigneur^ in the manner already described,1 and is entitled at once to half
the patrimony, not as a portion that can be taken away for separate use,
but in joint or common ownership. Local usages varied, and the written
" Customary " of Bareges speaks of fathers and mothers heritiers des
maisonSy as constituting their firstborn heir, by marriage contract,2 in a
manner exactly corresponding to Egyptian usage. The younger children
are entitled to a portion or dowry if they marry, and in this sense it is still
true that " the daughters are left heirs, but they procure wives for their
brothers." When the wife herself is not an heiress, her dowry is secured
by a general mortgage on her husband's property, again in accordance with
Egyptian precedent ; but, as in Egypt, she remains free to waive her claim
by contract in favour of other creditors.

The younger children, as in Malabar and Telos, are intended to remain
single as far as possible, adding their labour to the family stock and only
receiving maintenance and a trifling peculium. Their condition is fairly
indicated by the names esclaus and sterlo, serf and celibate, by which the
younger sons or cadets are collectively known. It was calculated recently
that only about half the adult members of each family married, and of
these some are provided for by marrying the eldest child of another house,
while others have earned a dowry by industry abroad. The heiresses
exercise exactly the same powers, as head of the family, as the eldest son
in the same position ; but in each case the consorts, who are chosen from
affection or supposed ability to share the reins of office, take control of the
part of the household or farm work appropriate to their sex. The women
are remarkable for their strength and the share which they take in the
hardest work, and girls as well as boys take part in the wrestling matches
which are among the favourite amusements of the people.

Anciently a sort of right of sanctuary was possessed by all women, and
special influence was accorded them in the tribal councils. At Illiberri
(Basque New town], Hannibal was said to have employed the native women
to arbitrate between their husbands and his troops. Sallust mentions that
it was the business of the Spanish matrons to rehearse the deeds of their

1 Ante, p. 212. Some further particulars, derived from the sources there quoted, will
be found in Prater's Magazine, May, 1878.

2 M. de la Greze, Hist, du Droit dans hs Pyrennees, p.. 223. This writer is much
scandalized by another deed of Egyptian type, a contract of marriage for a limited term
of years.

462 FROM MASS ALIA TO MALABAR.

ancestors to the young warriors proceeding to battle ; and he expressly
notes that young women were not given in marriage by their parents, but
themselves chose the most eminent in war to be their husbands. The
legend respecting the foundation of Marseilles seems to show that this
custom was general, and associated with acceptance of the son-in-law as
heir. The captain of a company of Phocaeans applied to the king of the
Segobriges, on the Ligurian coast east of the Rhone, for leave to build a
city on his territory. The king was preparing to marry his daughter,
Gyptis, "after the custom of that people," to a son-in-law chosen at a
solemn feast. The maiden was to give water to him whom she chose for
her husband, and overlooking her countrymen, turned to the Greeks and
held out water to Protis, who thus became the king's son-in-law, and was
presented with the ground for his city.1

Besides their singular marriage customs, the Basques retain the scarcely
less characteristic use of the antichresis : and in later times lawsuits were
common to compel restitution of land pledged generations before, in ex-
change for a sum of money down, but subject to be reclaimed at any
future time on repayment of the loan.3

Some of the Iberians of Andalusia in Strabo's time claimed to possess
ancient writings, poems and metrical laws six thousand years old, and
certainly had a written character — or rather more than one — of their own.
And according to Professor Sayce: " The so-called Kelt-Iberian alphabet
of early Spain is strangely like that of Karia ; "3 some forms are alleged to
be common to both ; in others the Spanish throws light on Lycian and
Carian letters, all of which, like the Cypriote characters, are partly derived
from the Phcenico-Greek alphabets and partly from an old " Asianic
syllabary " with Hittite and Akkadian affinities.

It is strange, considering the literary tastes of the race, that the fellow-
citizens of Ephorus should have enjoyed a proverbial reputation like that
of the Boeotians or the wise men of Gotham. The instances of their stu-
pidity quoted seem, however, to indicate the existence of a profound
difference between the general point of view of the people and that of the
wide-awake Greeks, whose contempt may have been as much tinged with
misunderstanding as many European witticisms aimed at the Chinese. It
was said, for instance, that the men of Cyme did not know their city stood
on the sea-shore, because the* city had been founded for three hundred
years before it began to derive a revenue from the levy of harbour tolls.
So the Mahomedan visitors at Calicut were amazed at the trifling nature
of the duties levied on foreign merchandise ; but it is by no means clear
that the stupidity lay on the side of the people, who, for centuries, mono-
polized the commerce of the world by opening their ports for the reception
of produce from every quarter of it.

All offshoots of the primitive domestic race had a turn for trade ; but
some contented themselves with internal traffic only, while others enriched
themselves mainly by foreign commerce. The exclusiveness of the former
1 Justin xliii. 2 De la Greze, p. 232. 3 S.B.A. Transactions, ix. 112.

AMAZONS AND IBERIANS. 463

class rested on political or moral reasons only, and the latter were free-
traders in every sense of the word, except that they wished to have no rivals
in the markets where they sold. No hindrance was placed in the way of
foreign traders desirous of selling to them.

The other example of Cymaean stupidity is more ambiguous. The people
were said to need a crier to tell them to take shelter when it rained ; and
this assertion apparently had some foundation in fact, as patriots did not
deny the imputation outright, but defended their wisdom by a far-fetched
fiction that the State had once borrowed money on the security of the city
porticoes, and not having repaid it when due, the citizens did not venture
to take shelter under them unless invited to do so by their creditors' pro-
clamation.1 Evidently, there was no want of financial intelligence among a
people which, at this early date, had indulged in the luxury of a municipal
debt ; and those who please may guess that the Greek jokes were prompted
by public notices — perhaps mistranslated — of the paternal sort, so common
in China, warning travellers against dangers of the road, or announcing
trivial police regulations.

The mortgaging public buildings is a perfectly historical occurrence, as
appears from an inscription of Halicarnassus,2 which sets forth how the
money for building a stoa was raised, partly by voluntary subscriptions,
partly by new mortgages on special sources of city revenue, and partly by
" a second mortgage on the annual budget of the town, debited already for
six talents, which are to be first paid off by instalments of one talent a year,
with its interest." And it seems fair to argue, from the context in which
the similar transaction at Cyme is mentioned, that such a method of raising
money was not common in purely Greek communities.

There is certainly nothing Boeotian, in the proverbial sense, about the
school of art which flourished at Cyme and the neighbouring Myrina,3
though its products bear a close resemblance to the terra-cottas ofTanagra,
a little town in Boeotia, on the borders of Attica. At Myrina, on the south
of the modern gulf of Tchandarlik, a number of most interesting terra-cotta
statuettes have been found, some of which are startlingly modern in their
pretty frivolity and humorousness. They are wonderfully varied and life-
like, some looking like examples of Parisian fin de sihle chic^ and others
suggesting a cross between Egyptian vivacity and Greek skill.

There is a great variety in action and attitude, with consequent variety
in the draperies, and it was a common device to attach different heads to
figures from the same mould, so as to vary the stock patterns of the manu-

1 Strabo, xiii. 3, § 6. I am indebted to my brother, G. A. Simcox, for the following sug-
gestion. It is clear from Aristophanes (Ach. 169-173) that it was unlawful (and, of course,
impracticable) to transact public business in the Assembly when it rained. When the
Assembly was held in the market-place, it was natural for the people to take shelter in the
surrounding corridors ; and the joke against the men of Cyme may have been that they
waited to do so till the heralds proclaimed that the Assembly was over. As heralds were
"messengers of Zeus and men," if the money to build the corridors had been bor-
rowed, from a temple, this conjecture would agree with the explanation given at Cyme.

2 A. G. /., 1893, DCCCXCVII., p. 74. The town of Calymna also borrowed money, a
dispute concerning its repayment being decided by Cnidus. Recueil, i. p. 159 ff.

3 Bui. de Cor. Hellcnique, vols. vi. (1882) p. 197, 388, 557 ; and vii. p. 81, 204.

464 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

facturer still further. Copies of popular statues were common ; for in the
early days, when art appeared as the elder sister of industry, artistic copy-
right had not been thought of, and the original artist had no advantage over
his imitators, except in so far as his skill exceeded theirs. The art-workman,
in compensation, was free to be as much of an artist as he could, and his
reputation was not merged in that of the factory for which he worked.
The Myrina statuettes are generally signed with the maker's name or initial ;
in one case, at least, father and son followed the same trade with distinc-
tion, and the latter signs at full — Pythodoros, son of Menophilos.

Nearly all the images seem to have been intended for funeral use, and,
with the exception of a few grotesques and an occasional Eros, Nike, or
Herakles, the figures are almost always those of women. Figures of the
gods, with a secret drawer, so to speak, in which small bones were con-
cealed, were popular ; and as M. Reinach suggests, the figures of Silenus,
to which Alcibiades compares Socrates in the Symposium,1 were probably an
invention of the same order. Besides the terra-cottas of Tanagra, Cyme,
and Myrina, no great number of parallel works have been found elsewhere,
except at Cyrene, where, however, the animation of the figures is in some
cases slightly overlaid by direct Phoenician and Greek influence.

That a knowledge of letters was generally possessed by the original
population of Asia Minor seems to follow from the retention of their own
language in the portions of a funeral inscription, which it was desired to
have generally understood, and from an amiable custom of addressing con-
fidential information to the passer-by, illustrated by more than one inscrip-
tion of the following type : " If thou wouldst reach (the town), oh stranger,
thou must leave the ravine and ascend the path ; but if thou feelest moved
to sacrifice to the nymphs, and to my father (Dionysus), go through the
hedge on the left" 2 The service of the gods and men is happily combined
when a convenient short-cut is pointed out in terms which leave those who
profit by it no choice save to pay the author of the placard the compliment
of worshipping at his private shrine. The taste for letters was indigenous,
not acquired ; for Strabo notices,3 as a peculiarity of the crowded and en-
thusiastic schools of Tarsus, that, unlike Athens, Alexandria, and other
resorts of students, they are only frequented by natives. The men of
Tarsus study at home and abroad, but strangers do not come to study with
them.

1 Symposium § 215.

2 Greek Inscriptions, I.e., DCCXCVII. and DCCCCX.

xiv. 5, § 13.

CHAPTER VI.

CRETE AND SPARTA.

IT only remains now to inquire how far the peculiar laws and customs of
Crete and Sparta approximate to the archaic or Lycian type, which we
have thus far endeavoured to track. The great Dorian cities of Pelopon-
nesus recognised as their common metropolis a tiny territory called Doris,
consisting of four townships on the borders of Phocis, just south of the
pass of Thermopylae. It would be strange if a small State thus situated
was altogether of a different type from its nearest neighbours on either
side, and accordingly the common meals of Sparta resemble those of the
Locrian colonies ; the Phocsean colonies, like Sparta, had laws or customs
tending to the multiplication of heiresses ; and the threefold classification
of the people in Lacedaemon corresponds exactly to that prevailing in
Thessaly*

In the latter country there was a landed aristocracy, supposed to be
descended from a band of Thesprotian conquerors. Under these were
various tribes, wholly or partly Greek, possessing the Amphictyonic
franchise and corresponding in status to the Laconian Perioeci, and at a
still lower level, the Penestae, compared to the Helots of Sparta, slaves or
serfs of the State, with no political rights, but a vested interest in the soil
they cultivated, subject to dues which, in the case of the Helots at least,
were not allowed to be increased. In both cases it seems probable that
the subjugated people were members of a civilized, pacific stock, and that
the harsh treatment, which drove them to frequent revolts, was partly
owing to fear and jealousy of the wealth acquired by many of them in
trade.

In Crete alone such revolts were unknown, and apparently not pro-
voked, which is one reason for believing the population of that island to
have been more homogeneous than that of Thessaly or Sparta. There
are traces of three grades of inhabitants ; but the Perioeci, whom Aristotle
compares with the Helots, were not only better treated, but occupied rela-
tively a position more like that of the Laconian countrymen. There was
apparently also a servile class called Mnoians and regarded as the slaves of
the State, over and above the slaves of private persons ; but this class must
have been numerically small and insignificant, as Aristotle overlooks it
altogether, and we hear nothing of its being either formidable or oppressed.
On the other hand, he expressly states that in his own time, " the Perioeci,
or subject population of Crete, were governed by the original laws which

P.C. ^ H H

466 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

Minos enacted," 1 — that is to say, by the ancient customary laws copied by
Lycurgus. So that the middle class of the historic period were descended
from the earliest rulers of the island, which has been described as " the
principal stepping-stone by which Phoenician civilization passed into
Greece."

The difference between Crete and Sparta lies in the temper and origin
of the highest and the lowest class. In Crete the aristocracy seems to
have been more or less of the same stock as the country householders ;
and that stock is one which never makes a harsh taskmaster, even to an
unmistakably lower race. The State serfs may have belonged to such a
race, even supposing them to have adopted the customs of their masters,
as has been done by the servile population under Berber influence in
Africa and by some of the lowest castes in Malabar. The laws of Crete
were ascribed to Minos because there was no tradition of a time when the
island was not subject to them ; the laws of Sparta were attributed to a
comparatively modern legislator, because there was a distinct tradition of a
period of turbulence and disorder, ending with a sort of revolution which
resulted in the establishment of the modification of Cretan custom familiar
to us.

Herodotus declares that the Spartans before Lycurgus lived under the
worst and after him under the best laws in Greece,2 and that he changed
everything ; and later accounts of his innovations represent them as
having been distasteful to the privileged classes,, who resisted the sacrifices
of ease and liberty more especially imposed on them. For a time after
the Dorian conquest, Lacedaemon may have been the scene of strife and
confusion such as were common in Thessaly later on, but underneath the
lawlessness on tWe surface there was a large, peaceable, settled population
with fixed customs, not at variance with the traditions of the little Dorian
metropolis. It is not possible for a legislator to " change everything " by
his own unassisted invention, but the singularly mixed character of Spartan
law, — the combination of social archaism, derived from the primitive race
with a savage exclusiveness and intolerance going beyond that of their
political contemporaries, — would be exactly explained, if we suppose the
revolution ascribed to Lycurgus to have consisted in a restoration of the
old customary laws of the mass of the people, and their extension to the
ruling class, so far as was compatible with the exclusive political authority
of the latter.

The Spartan constitution was to a certain extent artificial ; and the
citizens did not in the long run find it altogether natural or agreeable to
conform to the ideal, which political philosophers, in other States, admired
their legislator for setting up. Hence a constant sense of discrepancy
between the theory and practice of politicians, unknown to the domestic
States, and a gradual tendency to drop the burdensome restrictions ; so
that notwithstanding its greater fame, Sparta really observed for a much
shorter time than Crete the peculiar customs common to both.
1 Jowett's Aristotle, Bk. ii. 10, I. 2 i. 65.

CRETE AND SPARTA. 467

The description of the government of Crete which Strabo derived
from Ephorus is remarkable, as Hoeck pointed out long ago,1 for the pro-
minence it gives to the regulations concerning education, marriage, the
public meals and matters affecting private life and domestic usage, while
little mention is made of the distribution of power and the political con-
stitution of the State. The Greeks in general had an impression that the
Cretans had no written laws, but were governed by aypa^a vo/u//,a, tradi-
tional maxims having the force of law ; and Aristotle thinks it one of the
oligarchic features of the constitution that the elders give decisions after
their own judgment, instead of in accordance with the text of the laws.
It is not necessary, however, to write laws when every one knows what
they are, and in fact the education of children is said to have included
reading and chanting metrical laws,2 as well as certain kinds of music ;
and the comparatively late Gortyn code refers to earlier customs as " what
is written."

The object and essence of the constitution was to protect the property
of the citizens by securing their liberty ; and to guard both against encroach-
ment, by insisting upon a standard of temperance and frugality, which
could be imposed equally upon all. We have not a purely Cretan version
of the theory, but this is the way it presented itself to the Greeks. The
distrust of luxury, and inequality of wealth, as a source of political in-
equality, endangering the liberty and property of the many, acts in purely
Hamitic states on and through public opinion, which is the same in all
classes ; and thus the Chinese or Phoenician merchants, while acquiring
really more wealth than the most avaricious violator of the laws in Crete
or Sparta, might still observe the spirit of the constitution by distributing
their surplus acquisitions so as to promote the equality aimed at.

The Lycurgean legislation went beyond this customary restraint, and
forbade the citizens to engage in any kind of productive industry, while at
the same time they were required to keep up their military spirit by a hard
life and incessant severe discipline. But the object of all this self-denial
was to make Sparta formidable to adjoining States, and to keep the Spartan
citizens always in a position to crush the resistance of their subjects.
When success in these objects seemed most secure, the temptation to relax
the irksome discipline was strongest ; and so the whole history of Sparta
appears as a long-sustained but losing battle against human nature.

The self-denying ordinances imposed by public opinion on the rich in
the pacific, domestic States have an exactly opposite effect ; for all that
restrains accumulation by the rich, and raises the standard of well-being
among the poor, only makes it easier and pleasanter for all classes to main-
tain the status quo. The poor, when not oppressed, are prepared to resist
oppression, and the rich, who are not demoralized by excessive luxury and
idleness, do not desire to oppress their fellow-citizens. Crete suffered to
some extent from the same evils as Sparta, but in a less degree, the alien
political element being weaker in proportion ; and it is perhaps worth noting
1 Kretat iii. p. 5. * Strabo, x. iv. 16-22.

468 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

that Polybius, who takes a very unfavourable view of the Cretan character,
observes that all the best men in the island come from Lyctus. Lyctus was
held to be a Lacedaemonian colony, and the critic may have thought that
the reservation was uncomplimentary to the natives ; but several references
seem to show that Lyctus was also distinguished by the purity and strict-
ness of its customs ; and as it certainly did not owe its customs to Sparta,
we may be permitted to doubt whether the character of its citizens owed
anything either, and if not, the verdict of Polybius would imply that the
Cretans were least objectionable when least Grsecized.

The same word, Cosmus, was used for the constitutional government,
and for the ten chief officials administering it ; the cosmi were chosen
from certain privileged families ; they acted as generals,, were not paid,
and held office for one year only, but were at liberty to retire before its
close, a right which was probably claimed by those who found themselves
hopelessly at variance with their colleagues or the public. One of the ten
had his name used in public documents by way of date, and treaties are
signed as by those " who were cosmi with So-and-so." A council corre-
sponding to the elders of Sparta, and presumably also thirty in number,
was elected from those who had served as cosmi. The ecclesias or public
meetings were open to all classes, and the decrees of the elders and cosmi
were submitted to them for ratification, but apparently they could only
vote Yea or Nay, not initiate any proposition.

According to Aristotle, the nobles and the people were given to con-
spiring against the government, rival parties being formed, and the office
of the cosmi suspended for a time ; 1 but as it was always restored ulti-
mately, one is inclined to imagine that the peaceable masses allowed their
chiefs to quarrel for office as they pleased, and to hold it unlawfully if they
could, provided such acosmia only concerned the office-holders and did
not interfere with the real order of the State ; but that if these limits were
exceeded, cosmi enjoying public confidence would be restored. Aristotle
objects that " all matters of this kind are better regulated by law than by
the will of man, which is a very unsafe rule;" but as all law depends for its
observance on the will of man, the Cretans needed no written law on the
subject, so long as they themselves habitually willed to keep their rulers
in order.

The public meals were arranged in Crete more democratically than in
Sparta. Strabo, after Ephorus, represents them as serving to promote good
will, by promoting equality in temperance and frugality, which was done
by enabling the poor, who were fed at the public charge, to partake of the
same fare as the rich.2 Aristotle understood the public tables to be main-
tained out of public funds, in the case of towns with a considerable revenue,
but in others, as at Lyctus, each member of the association or brotherhood
contributed a tithe of his harvest for the common meals. The fraction of
the public revenue, whatever it was, assigned for this purpose was divided
among the families of the citizens, and used by them to defray their share
, * Politics, ii. 10, § 14. 2 x. iv. 16.

CRETE AND SPARTA. 469

of the joint expense. Those who were unable, from poverty, to contribute
anything of their own, were not disfranchised, as in Sparta, but received
sufficient assistance from the public funds to enable them to pay their
quota, while presumably a corresponding number of the rich failed to
claim their share of the common revenue.

Cretan towns had special officers or overseers whose business it was to
keep good order and arrange for the entertainment of strangers. There
were at least two buildings for the common meals in every town — one for
hospitality to guests, and one for the Syssitia ; but as in the larger towns
one building could not hold all the men and boys, the tables of the
hetairiae were probably not all under the same roof. The boys waited
upon their elders and had half rations, with the exception of orphans, who
received a full man's ration, but unspiced. M. Jannet, who treats the
institutions of Sparta as purely Greek, yet alludes to the Kabyle " thime-
cheret," or distribution of meat, as an equivalent for the ancient Syssitia,
with exactly the same social import.1

In Kabyle villages, at the present day, one of the principal duties of the
headman or Amin is to provide for the entertainment of strangers. A
visitor who has no acquaintances in the place he enters, says to the first
person he meets : " I come as a guest to the village," and is at once
received and entertained as his rank requires. The same officer regulates
the demand on each household for public purposes, and superintends the
"division of meat "just referred to. French economists are somewhat
scandalized by this venerable communistic usage, which serves, as an
exceptional or temporary measure, the same purpose as the ancient Syssitia.

The community from time to time decides to kill an animal for the
public benefit, the funds for the purpose being taken from the fines for
criminal offences, the rent of corn mills, and surplus revenues generally.
The meat is divided into portions, which are distributed by lot, and the
poor share in the division (which is of course more of a boon to them than
to their richer neighbours), without any sense of inferiority. The spirit
of the institution is illustrated by two other rules for mutual accommodation :
if a villager is obliged by accident. to slaughter an animal between the
regular market days, it is customary for the neighbours to guarantee him
against loss, by buying the meat in due proportions, and this is called a
thamaount, — help or succour. If, on the other hand, the irregular slaughter
is quite voluntary, the family are required to give public notice of their
intention, in order that the sick or expectant mothers may obtain meat if
they wish for it.

Wealth and luck are expected to be unequally distributed, but the rich
man is required to publish to the world such items of expenditure as
exceed the customary level, and to pay a sort of toll to those in trouble ;
while the poor man, instead of falling a prey to greedy dealers who make
a profit out of his extremity, has a market improvised for him by the good
will of his neighbours, in which he can sell without disadvantage. Among

1 Les Institutions sociales et k droit civil en Sparte. P. Jannet, 2nd ed. r88o, p. 72.

470 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

a people accustomed to limit the risks and license of individualism in this
way, it was possible for the institution of common meals to thrive spon-
taneously, and it was in harmony with some other early domestic institu-
tions.

The account of the Spartan banquets, in Athenaeus, seems to represent
that institution as approaching more to the semi-voluntary hospitality of
the Berbers than is commonly imagined. He describes the feast called
copis, when flesh and a cake, beans, figs, and such like accessories are
given to every one who likes to take them ; this was done especially at a
festival celebrated on behalf of the children, just as the Kabyle distri-
bution of meat by private persons is associated with domestic rejoicings
for a birth or marriage. The ordinary Spartan supper was described as
itself very plain and meagre, consisting of pork and barley cake, or some-
times only a morsel of meat and broth, cheese and figs ; but this was
supplemented by a kind of dessert,1 partly fruits or sweets, — meal steeped
in oil, which was wrapped in bay-leaves — contributed by the rich, or game
and meat presented by successful hunters or the larger stock owners, who
were allowed to eat at home after a hunt or sacrifice. According to another
account, loaves of bread and a slice of meat called aiklon were set before
all those who came to the phiditium (or philitium\ while the servant who
distributed the portions was followed by an attendant, who proclaimed
the name of him who sent the aiklon round. A slight tax was also im-
posed on the successful suitor in any case heard before the Ephors, the
proceeds of which were spent in providing the cakes used for this dessert or
addition to the supper, as the Kabyle taxes in paying for the thimecheret.

The noimal number of associates at a table was fifteen, and the groups
partook so far of the nature of a club that members were chosen or rejected
by ballot. The management of the table was entrusted to some woman of
good family, who had the right of bestowing the choicest and most honour-
able portions upon whomsoever she held to be most eminent in wisdom or
valour. Curiously enough, while in Melanesia something like the common
meals of Dorians and Berbers are met with,2 there is also, in Samoa, an
office called Taupo, which may be taken to illustrate the original character
of this Spartan custom.3 The "maid of a village" who bears this name
is generally the daughter, real or adopted, of the ruling chief; any way, she
is a girl of good looks and noble birth, who holds office till marriage,
unless deposed for unseemly behaviour. She receives strangers, chews
kava for them, and in general "does the honours" of the village; she is
dressed by a council of matrons to the highest possible pitch, and is in all
ways a personage of much authority and influence. The Spartan cooks
were men,4 so that there was no room for a woman merely as housekeeper,

v ; the aiklon was an evening meal, and the writers followed by Athenseus
(Deipnosophists, Bk. IV. sect. 15-21) seem divided as to whether it was the meal itself
or the dessert which was given in this way.

2 Codrington, p. 100 ff.

3 W. B. Churchward, My Consulate in Samoa, p. 348.

4 Plutarch. Lycurgus^ xii.

CRETE AND SPARTA. 471

so to speak, for the tables, and it is difficult to see what can have been the
functions of the one described, unless we are prepared to look for analogies
in Samoa, and in the Irish female Brewy and the Guanche women of wise
council, and conjecture that the Spartan institution may have been inter-
mediate between these.

An interesting inscription of Lyctus1 justifies us in connecting the
largesses of Carian and other priests in Asia Minor with the archaic
communism of Crete. On the occasion of two feasts, one of Bacchus and
one of Belkhanos (a god otherwise unknown, and said to be a Cretan Zeus),
the proto-cosmos or epimelete of the year was required to make a distri-
bution to the people. This was to be done on the festival of Bacchus " with
the gifts out of which the startoi ( = stratoi)2 receive 1500 denarii," and on
.the other with " the money which is given to the tribes." Certain revenues
were thus, it is evident, regarded not merely as common property, but as
common property to be distributed for individual use. If these sources
are insufficient, the officer concerned must supply what is wanting himself,
" as Symmachus the epimelete did," and as Asiatic priests who earned
statues did.

The ancient Cretan name for the common meals was Andreia^ which
naturally seems to refer to the separation of the sexes at meals : the women
in Crete ate at home with the youngest children, and an obvious reason
for the separation, which existed among the Carians also, is supplied by
the isolation of the unmarried youths in " troops," who lived and ate in
common, and the usage which forbade young married men to live openly
with their wives. Strabo asserts, after Ephorus, that the young men from
the military troops were required to marry at the same time, on reaching
a certain standing, and up to that time their life was evidently to some
extent on a par with that of the young warriors among the Masai or Zulus.
The Spartan custom, by which the young husband was only allowed to
visit his wife by stealth, belongs to the same archaic state of society as the
troops of fighting bachelors ; and that the same custom existed anciently
in Crete appears from the statement that the youths, when married, did
not at once take their brides home, but waited till they were qualified
to manage the affairs of a household. The suggestion of this imaginary
motive for the custom seems to show that it must have been on the wane
even when Ephorus wrote, and we know on other grounds, that about
the 5th cent. B.C., the old customary law was being materially modified
by statute. Boys in Crete lived in private or " hidden " up to the age of
seventeen, when they were received into the agela or troops of youths, who
lived, exercised, and slept together. The troops were maintained at the
public cost, and both in Crete and Sparta there was some approach to a
similar organization among the girls.

The Spartans, like the Nabataeans and the Nairs, practised polyandry,
with the object of preventing an increase in the number of the citizens

1 Bulletin de Correspondance Hellenique, 1889, p. 61 ff.

2 The "hosts" of able-bodied men.

472 FROM MASS ALIA TO MALABAR.

entitled to land. In communities, where the same restrictions on marriage
prevail, there is always a considerable degree of license tolerated among
the unmarried girls ; and the legend of the Parthenise, by whom Tarentum
was said to be colonized, may be connected with reminiscences of this
kind. It is also possible that the colony was sent by a malcontent, con-
servative party, at the time of some change in the law of marriage and
inheritance, corresponding to that effected by the Gortyn code. The
name, however, is not an uncommon one on the track of the Pelasgians ;
Parthenia was an ancient name for Samos, and there are rivers, mountains,
or promontories in Elis, Arcadia, and the Tauric Chersonese and the
Cimmerian Bosphorus, as well as temples and cities, with the same name ;
so that the legend may be a purely gratuitous attempt to account for a
significant name. Neither in Crete nor Sparta is there any mention of
societies or clubs of the grown-up women, like the varangis of Minicoy.

Nothing is known of the functions of the Cretan knights, except that,
unlike the three hundred young Spartan warriors bearing the same name,
they had horses. There can be little doubt that this body corresponds to
the larger representative senate of the same number common among the
Phoenicians and other peoples of Asia Minor, though its character had
undergone a complete change in Sparta. It is possible that the council of
Thirty in Crete and Carthage was recruited from the three hundred, and
that the mysterious Carthaginian tribunals of Five were selected in the
same way as the Agathoergi described by Herodotus.1 According to him
the title was borne by citizens who had completed their term of service
among the knights : the five eldest of the knights go out of office every
year, and are required to serve the State as ambassadors, or in any other
capacity if required during the ensuing twelvemonth ; and the elders would
naturally be elected from among those who had given most proof of
ability in this intermediate charge. Xenophon reports the knights to have
been selected by three nominees of the Ephors, who themselves were five
in number. Accounts differ as to the antiquity of the latter office, which
was supposed to originate with the desire to control the royal power.

The fact that the kings are counted among the thirty gerontes may be
taken to indicate that they were originally only chiefs or presidents of the
senate, and it is possible that the importance of the Ephors began with
constitutional resistance to Doric attempts at increasing the royal power.
There is evidence of this in the addition made to the Lycurgean Rhetra,
according to Plutarch, by two kings a century after Lycurgus, that " in
case the people decide crookedly, the senate with the kings should reverse
their decision." The original text of the rhetra or covenant which
Lycurgus was supposed to have received from the Delphic oracle sounds
like a general traditional rule concerning the founding of States. Temples
are to be built ; the tribes are to be divided (in Sparta as in so many other
cases there were three), the obes (clans or families, answering to the Attic
phratriae) were to be distinguished ; the council of elders with its chiefs
1 i. 67. Five Cosmi are mentioned in an inscription of Lato.

CRETE AND SPARTA. 473

was to be established ; the people were to be summoned to periodical
assemblies in a specified open place, and matters submitted for acceptance
and rejection, " for the people shall have the decision and power." The
number thirty occurs between the mention of the obes and the senate,
and might therefore apply to either or both.

The peculiar word used for putting the question to the assembly corre-
sponds to that which denotes an officer at Cnidus, in Caria, where a
council of Sixty "chosen men of the best "held office for life. Their
decisions in the preliminary discussions, held on all matters of importance,
were taken by the 'A^eor^p, and the recurrence of the word in the Lycur-
gean Rhetra lends confirmation to the view that the Spartan legislation has
most affinity with pre-Hellenic custom ; while it may also be taken as an
indication that the popular vote was not a mere form.1

The absence of any other executive in Sparta makes it probable that
the institution of the Ephors was primitive, like that of the Cosmi, to
whom Aristotle compares them. In both States they only served for a
year and the elders for life, a provision well adapted to restrict the growth
of authority, since it is permanent control of the executive which enables
personal influence to consolidate itself. Consultative power, on the other
hand, does not grow more formidable, rather the contrary, by remaining in
the same hands. The democratic character ascribed to the Ephors arises
partly from the office having been open to all classes, while the cosmi
were in fact, if not by law, chosen from the aristocracy ; and partly from
the kings, who held office for life, having enough share in the executive to
make them wish for more, so that the mass of citizens, who sought to
maintain the virtually republican constitution, were led to choose repre-
sentatives who would oppose encroachments on the part of the kings or
senate.

Aristotle says that the Ephors were chosen in a childish manner,2 and
Plutarch's account of the way in which the votes were taken at the election
of elders might receive the same epithet. Failing clear contemporary
information one may conjecture that public opinion as to the merits of
the candidates expressed itself in some simple informal fashion, sanctioned
by custom, but without the mechanism for securing accuracy and fair play
demanded by politicians, who look upon government as a game, at which
some of the players are likely to cheat. Peoples of the Hamitic type do
not care enough about politics to make an object of winning at the game,
and have therefore no temptation to cheat at it ; and even in Sparta, where
this type was crossed with a strain of Dorian policy, the magistrates are
accused rather of venality, of taking bribes to neglect their duty, than of
spontaneous aggressions or the use of their power as a means of giving
bribes, which is the true politician's favourite sin.

1 Grote, ii. 466. Plutarch, Quasi. Graec., c. 4. The Cnidian council were called amne-
mones, perhaps in contradistinction to an eponymous president, like the Cretan proto-
cosmos. It will be remembered that eldest sons were privileged in Cnidus, ante p. 435.

2 Politics, ii. 9, § 23.

474 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

The senators and even the kings could be called to account for their
conduct by the Ephors, while the latter were responsible to no one ; this
seemed improper to Aristotle, because the elders were aristocrats and the
Ephors quite common men ; but the arrangement is eminently charac-
teristic of primitive democracy. The Delphic oracle, like the Chinese
Classics, knew that great men may be tempted to arrogance and lawless-
ness, but that small men are rather too little than too much disposed to
take responsibilities on themselves ; they need the encouragement of
security, just as the self-asserting few need the check of responsibility.
The same idea prevailed in Crete, where the cosmi were liable to fines if
they failed to carry out the will of the people, and were required to give
an account of their stewardship because, though they held office no longer
than the Ephors and had no greater powers, they were chosen out of a
class more likely to be at once able and willing to abuse their position.

Every considerable town in Crete had cosmi and a regular government
of its own, and the different towns alternately fought and made treaties
with each other as the Hellenic or Phoenician mood was in the ascendant.
These treaties sometimes fix the boundaries of the cities concerned, or
secure community of civil and religious rights to their inhabitants ; freedom
of trade, right of asylum and the power to hold land in the allied town
are secured to the contracting parties. One treaty between Hierapytna
and Prasos provides that any complaint made against officials or private
persons in one town, by a member of the other, should be tried in a
common court, apparently a third city to be agreed upon every year by
the cosmi of the two allies. Each city is bound to pay the expenses of
the cosmi sent as ambassadors from the other, and if the cosmi of a city
failed to fulfil this obligation, it had to pay ten staters to the embassy as
an indemnity. A fine of ten times that amount was imposed on the
cosmi, if they omitted to have the treaty solemnly read over every year
after due notice. One cosmus from the allied city had a right to sit in
the assembly of the other with its officers. It seems as if the elders, or
council of Thirty, had looked after the domestic affairs of the city, subject
to control by its assembly, while foreign affairs were mainly in the hands
of the cosmi.

By a characteristic provision it was agreed that fines imposed by the
common court, for conduct at variance with the treaty, were to be divided
between the two cities, not given in full to the complainant, as might have
been proposed by less astute politicians. The treaty is signed by " the
Cosmi with Henipas and Neon," i.e. by the cosmi of the two cities with
these two as respective proto-cosmi • and this is the usual form, the name
serving to date as well as to authenticate the document.

Nearly all the treaties provide penalties to be inflicted on the cosmi if
they fail to read the treaty, or to give notice of its public reading at the
time enjoined. And the treaties of alliance entered into between
Antigonus and the towns of Eleuthernse and Hierapytna show that the
difficulties which beset democracies in diplomatic affairs were guarded

CRETE AND SPARTA. 475

against in the same way. The treaty provides that the cosmi must call an
assembly within a certain time after the king applies for help, and must send
it within twenty days after it is voted : they must also give precedence
to the claims of the envoys over all other business when the assembly has
met, subject to fines for neglect.1 At Hierapytna, the fines of the cosmi,
if any were incurred, were to be paid to the city appointed as umpire.

This appointment of an ekkletos or umpire city is a very common
feature in Cretan treaties. Thus Olus and Lato agreed to submit all
disputes that might arise between them to the arbitrage of Cnossus. The
decree which tells us of the treaty, shows that it was a renewal of former
agreements, as Cnossus is to decide " the same disputes as from the
beginning." As a guarantee for submission to the award, each city had to
find Cnossians to give security for the sum of ten talents, the cosmi of
Cnossus being entitled, if either party refused obedience, to hand over the
surety money to the other; which of course they could only be in a
position to do if it was held by their own citizens.2 The position of the
sureties must have been curiously like that of the Hong merchants in
China, when responsible for the foreign barbarians admitted to trade, and
it is reasonable to conjecture that the consideration for which they
accepted the heavy pecuniary responsibility required by the treaty, took
the form of commercial privileges. Originally Cnossus was required to
give its award within six months of the reference to its decision, but this
period was afterwards extended by general consent to a year.

Treaties or fragments of treaties remain between Gortyn and Lappa,
the Arkadi of Crete and Hierapytna,3 and the same city and Priene (all
respecting rights of exportation) ; between Gortyn and Cnossus, between
Drerus and Cnossus against Lyctus, and between Lyctus and Malla, while
other inscriptions record the decrees passed in honour of representatives
of the umpire city, whose decisions had put an end to strife. So judges
from Cnossus and Lyctus restored order in a neighbouring city (conjec-
tured to be Drerus), when confusion had reached such a pitch, that title-
deeds and contracts were no longer respected. An honorific decree of the
same kind was found at Larissa, where it was ordered to be set up in
honour of judges sent by Mylasa on the application of Thessalians, but the
device seems only to have flourished along the track of Pelasgic migra-
tion.4 The importance attached to private contracts, which makes dis-
regard of them the strongest sign of political disorder, is also evidenced by
several references to a depot for such documents at Cnossus and else-
where ; and the restoration of the archives of Hierapytna, at the expense
of one of the officers of the city, is also characteristic,

1 The peasants in the Servian Skuptschina have recently re-invented this plan of
enforcing ministerial responsibility by fines and caution money.

2 Bulletin de Correspondence Helttnique, 1879, p. 292. 3 Ib., 1889, p. 48 ff.

4 The story in Herodotus (v. 28), of how, after two generations of civil strife, Miletus
appealed to the Parians for counsel, seems to point to a similar institution. So Megara
and Miletus arbitrate respectively between Epidaurus and Corinth and Messene and
Lacedsemon. Recueil des Inscr.Jur. Grecques, i. p. 168.

476 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

The Cretan ecclesia was open to all the citizens, the city and the people
being convertible terms ; but Crete may have differed from Sparta in
allowing descendants of the Perioeci, living in town and enriched by
trade, to count as citizens. Commerce and industry were in the hands
of this class, and Hoeck conjectures that the periods of acosmia, of which
Aristotle speaks, may have been caused by the ambition of rich men, who
were not eligible as cosmi.

The proverbial addiction of Cretans to the sea l gradually ceased under
Dorian influence ; the island possessed good harbours, but few raw pro-
ducts for export, save wine and oil, while the corn supply was insufficient
for its needs. Crete was the nearest Greek station to the African coast,
and the intercourse between the two is evidenced by the existence in the
port of Gortyn of a temple to ^Esculapius modelled on one at Cyrene ;
one writer absolutely calls the Libyans Cretans, and at the present day
Africans find their way to Crete without greater facilities than existed
3,000 years ago.

Various traditions speak of a close connection between the inhabitants
of Crete and of ^Egina, the Birmingham of the y£gean, though the pro-
verb which associates their names had seemingly an uncomplimentary
intention.2 Cretan pretexts were a by-word like Punic faith, and to
" Cretize a Cretan " was an achievement as it might be to "Jew a Jew."
The typical Cretan divined by intuition what others were plotting, and had
an unamiable faculty of concealing his own intentions, which laid him
open to the charge of fraud. In fact, among the Greeks they had the
same reputation as the Phoenicians throughout the Mediterranean,
though their laws and customs exercised a peculiar fascination for the most
philosophical of Greek politicians.

According to Ephorus, Lyctus, Gortyn, and other small cities observed
the national customs more minutely than Cnossus, the original capital
celebrated by Homer. Cnossus afterwards lost its ascendency, and the
superiority was transferred to Gortyn and Lyctus. Plato puts the men of
Gortyn at the head of the Cretans of his day, and the inscription 3 dis-
covered in the ruins of the city in 1884 is presumably a relic from the
time of its supremacy.

This very important and interesting document contains a complete body
of private law in twelve chapters, several of which strike the translators
and commentators, who read them by the light of Roman or purely Greek
law, as perplexing, while the same passages are quite in accordance with
precedent, if taken as remains of pre-Hellenic, quasi-Hamitic custom.
The first chapter deals with actions for the recovery of slaves, a wrongful
claim being punished by fine, the amount of which varies according to
whether the party claimed was a slave or free. The slave has the power

1 '0 Kp^s TV 6A\aff<rav. Cf. Hoeck, Geschichtliche Briichstiicke, iii. 405 ff.

2 KpTjs 777)6 s Alyiv/}Tai>— a phrase which seems to have had the significance of Greek
meeting Greek in the battlefield of commerce.

3 Most fully discussed and translated by F. Biicheler and E. Zitelmann. Das Recht
von Gortyn, Rhein. Mus. of Philologie, 1885.

CRETE AND SPARTA. 477

of taking sanctuary in a temple, as in Egypt : if, however, he does so
because he wishes to belong to a master who has been judicially con-
demned to give him up, that master must show the lawful owner where
he has taken refuge ; such knowledge, however, gave no right to a forcible
recovery of the fugitive, only an opportunity for persuasion.

The second chapter prescribes penalties, mostly fines, for adultery, and
regulates the conditions of divorce. " When man and wife separate, she
shall have her own, what she had when she came to the man, and half the
produce of her property which is there, and the half of all her weaving,
whatsoever it be ; and five staters (in addition to the above), if the man is
to blame. If he denies, the judge will decide upon oath." No penalty is
provided for the case of the woman being to blame, and this is the first
indication in the code that it originated with a people who think of the
relation of marriage as one in which the wife, rather than the husband)
dictates the terms. Egyptian moralists warn the injured husband not to
ill-treat his wife. " Has she transgressed ? Let her depart with her
property."

The idea of marriage as an exclusive, life-long, relation was at first
restricted to an aristocratic few ; the man who had a family, wife and
children, and house of his own, was supposed to enjoy a privilege ; but
the man who had failed to secure it was not at first held to have suffered
an actionable wrong; if his wife chose to leave him, that gave him no
right to retain the property she possessed before marriage, or had earned
during it. If, however, she was willing to adhere to her part of the mar-
riage compact, and was driven away by the man's default, even the late
Cretan law held she was entitled to compensation. The stipulation as to
the property to be taken away by the divorced wife resembles those in the
Irish laws. If the wife took more than the amount specified, she was liable
to fine.

The third chapter deals mainly with inheritance. If a man dies, leav-
ing children, the wife, if she pleases, may have her own property back and
what the man gave her " according to what is written " (or according to
the law), before three witnesses; and in this case, of course, the children
take their father's property and remain under the guardianship of his fam-
ily, while retaining any earnings or additions made to the original portion
of their mother. Practically this arrangement would take effect whenever
the widow intended to marry again, and no hindrance was placed in the
way of her doing so. If there were no children from the marriage, the
wife took half her own weavings and the fruits of her property, and
shared with her husband's relatives the corresponding goods left by him
in addition to her lawful dower. If the wife died without children, her
" belongings " take a corresponding half-share to that claimed by the
family of a deceased husband. The code seems conceived in the interest
of these epiballontes, the rights of husband and wife towards each other,
and of mothers, in relation to their children, being restricted in the interest
of the kinsfolk.

478 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

If man and wife wish to make a gift to each other, of money, clothes,
or other articles of value, it must not exceed the value of twelve staters.
Now in Egypt and Malabar, the object of large gifts from husband to
wife, or conversely, is to secure inheritance to the children of the marriage.
If the spouses are free to give away absolutely their share of the family
property, the claim of the epiballontes to a half-share with the children
on death would be defeated. But there must certainly have been a dis-
position in some section of the community to make such gifts on a large
scale, or the act would not have been forbidden, however strong the con-
ception of the opposite claims of kinship had become.

The same kind of inference is warranted by the clause in the fourth
chapter, which declares, " The father shall have power over the children
and over the goods and the division thereof, and the mother over her own
property." Evidently there had been a time, within human memory,
when the mother had power over the children and the property and the
division thereof; the innovation lies, not in giving the mother control
over her own property, but in restricting her control to that. Similarly, in
the next clause, we find traces of the claim of children to a partnership in
their parents' property. The law proceeds : " So long as they (the parents)
live, it is not necessary for them to divide," but an exception is made in
the case of a child who cannot pay damages to which he has been sen-
tenced, and who must receive a portion of his share for that purpose " as
has been written."

The Gortyn code provides for the division of the parents' property, the
sons taking two parts of everything and the daughters one, as was still
done in Strabo's time ; but the sons took all the houses and oxen, unless
there was no property except a house, and then the daughters were to be
provided for in accordance with some earlier law.1 Gifts from fathers to
daughters, as from husband to wife, were limited by law; what had been
so given or guaranteed before the publication of the code was not inter-
fered with, but it was to be counted as part of the share which might
afterwards fall due by inheritance. Gifts from father to daughter, as from
husband to wife, must be made in the presence of three adult free wit-
nesses. Chapter V. begins with a very perplexing passage. A woman
who has no property, either by father's or brother's gift, or promise or
inheritance, i.e. "those when the ^Ethalian men ruled, the Cosmi with
Kyllos, shall inherit but those before that have no legal claim." 2

1 In parts of modern Greece it is not thought proper for sons to marry till all the
daughters are provided for.

2 The ^Ethalians are mentioned in another Cretan inscription (Visscher, Kleins
Schriften, iii. p. 3), which is too obscure itself to throw much light upon the present
passage, and in two treaties, one certainly and one possibly concerning the city of Drerus
(Bulletin, 1885. Cretan Inscriptions , pp. 1-28). The inscription of Drerus, in which the
phrase (eirl TUI> AldaXeuv Koafjuovruv} occurs, is considered by the editor to be much later
than the Gortyn code ; and if this were so, instead of referring to some one definite period,'
it must imply that at recurring intervals all the cosmi were chosen out of the same family.
Suidas' rendering of Aithalos as the name of a lord and a place does not help us much.
The other inscription is a treaty, and the opening words may be read as if the two per-

CRETE AND SPARTA. 479

The ^Ethalians, it has been conjectured, were one of the noble houses
from which the cosmi were chosen ; and if so, the code implies that they
monopolized that office at some period long enough to set its mark upon
legislation. If the native laws of Crete concerning marriage and inherit-
ance were of the Lycian and Iberian type, it was inevitable that power-
ful Greek houses, with quite opposite instincts and traditions, should aim
at repealing them entirely, just as many English, in the days of Elizabeth,
saw nothing but barbarism in the ancient laws of Ireland. The code has
the appearance of a. compromise between the custom of the country
people, by which property passed mainly through daughters, and a revo-
lutionary statute of the ^Ethalians, disinheriting women altogether or
reducing them to tutelage. If this were so, the code would give relief, up
to a certain point, to the victims of the yEthalian period. But women
before that time — when the father who wished to endow his posterity did
so by gifts of his property to daughters — would have received gifts at
marriage on a scale now prohibited, and therefore would have no further
claim to share inheritances falling in afterwards.

The explanation is only conjectural, but it makes every part of the law
intelligible and consistent, while many passages in the code are inconsis-
tent with the view that it represents a growing liberality towards women,
like that of recent English legislation.

If an unmarried woman in the household gave birth to a child, it is
said that the lord of the father shall rear it, — but if he is dead, then the
lord of the brothers ; whether the brothers of the father or those of the
woman are intended is doubtful, but the clause recalls Strabo's account of
the Gargarenses.1 It does not refer to slaves, but to dependants, or even
relatives of the householder's, and it points to a state of civilization
similiar to that prevailing in Ireland, when the right of a woman to have
children by a stranger was only restricted, because all acknowledged chil-
dren had a right to share in the family land or property.

In the ordinary course of things, children, grandchildren, and great-
grandchildren inherit by the code ; failing these, brothers and brothers'
children or grandchildren, and failing these, sisters and sisters' children
or grandchildren ; after them the epiballontes, the kinsmen or clansmen,
who either divide the inheritance by consent, or, if they disagree, call in
a judge to arbitrate. When the wife dies, leaving children, the father may
administer their maternal inheritance, but must not sell or pledge it with-
out the consent of the adult children. There is no corresponding pro-
vision for giving the wife even a life interest in her husband's estate ; for
the archaic custom, which the code supersedes, made no such provision,
the wife being endowed by her father, rather than the husband by his.
And the code itself being designed to restrict rather than increase the
proprietary rights of women, would not naturally introduce a new stipu-

sons named were cosmi of the town of Aithalos, which is unlikely, because in such
cases only one cosmus from each town is usually named.
1 Ante, p. 455.

480 FROM MASSALfA TO MALABAR.

lation in their favour, merely for the sake of symmetry. If the father
marries again, the children receive their mother's estate.

While the father lives, the son must not sell or pledge any part of the
inheritance, but he may, if he pleases, sell what he has himself -earned or
inherited. The father is not allowed to sell the son's, nor the husband
the wife's property, nor a son the mother's ; and if they do so they must
pay double to the purchaser and restore the original goods to the owner.
All these prohibitions seem directed against the joint-ownership enjoyed
by the family group of Egypt or the Basque country. It is only when the
son enters, as of course, into partnership with his parents, on his nativity
or marriage, that the idea of his right to alienate their possessions could
present itself at all. When this partnership is a reality, the son's earnings
pass to the community ; but the father who acts " for his sons " in selling
what is his own, a fortiori, would only sell for their advantage what was
theirs.

We have seen how in Egypt the proprietary independence of women
allowed them to act for the benefit of sons and husbands with a freedom
much restricted under the system of tutelage, and the tendency of the
code is to prevent wives and mothers from endangering the reversionary
rights of their kinsmen, by alienations for the benefit of sons and hus-
bands. Greek individualism favoured the belief that sons,, husbands, and
male relatives generally gained more by claiming for every one the right to
do as he pleased with his own, than by authorizing the domestic trio to
deal as one man with its threefold possessions. The correctness of the
belief itself maybe questioned, but there can be little doubt that this
Gortyn code represents the struggle between individualism and paternal
power on the one hand, and the decaying remnants of domestic commun-
ism and mother-law on the other.

The seventh chapter lays down the principle, diametrically opposed to
Lycian law, that the children follow the father's status. The children of a
free woman by a slave are slaves. If a woman with property has children,
some of whom are free and others slave-born, her property goes to the free-
born children only ; and if she had none such, it would go to her relatives.
Such a contingency seems scarcely conceivable, and the fact that it is pro-
vided for seems to show that the legislator desired to put a stop — still in
the interest of the epiballontes — to the license used by some women of
independent fortune.

There are numerous provisions relating to the marriage of heiresses, all
of which are Greek in their way of regarding the woman as an appendage
to the inheritance, but the phrase describing how heiresses are made pre-
serves a few traces of the pre-Hellenic custom which made heiresses incon-
veniently numerous. According to one clause an heiress-daughter is made
by father's or brother's gift, and the term seems to be used in two senses —
for one who owns property in consequence of such gift, and for one who
has inherited her father's estate in default of male heirs. According to
another clause, " an heiress is when there is no father or brother from the

CRETE AND SPARTA. 481

same father." A father's eldest brother has a right to marry the heiress ;
but failing sons, a man's property may pass to his daughter, subject to the
right of uncles, cousins, or fellow-clansmen to claim her hand and fortune.
If an heiress loses her husband and has children, she may marry again
within the phyle, but cannot be compelled to do so ; but if there are no
children, she is married whether she likes it or no.

A fragmentary passage limits what a mother may give her son, or a hus-
band his wife, to 100 staters ; but the last clause stipulates that no litigation
is to take place concerning gifts made before the code, which provides only
for the future. By a provision similar to that in the laws of Charondas, an
heiress daughter was left to the guardianship of her mother, though her
property was administered by her uncles. Under some circumstances the
mother's brothers acted as guardians, and no one, save the two sets of
uncles conjointly, was allowed to sell or pledge the property of an infant
heiress.

Adoption appears to have been common, and is tolerated rather than
encouraged by the code. Women and children are forbidden to adopt ;
and an adoptive son only received a daughter's share, if there were any
legitimate children. Failing such children, he might take the whole pro-
perty, and was then required to give a feast to the hetairia, and to fulfil all
civil and religious obligations, otherwise the estate reverted to the " belong-
ings," as it did also upon the death of such an adoptive son without chil-
dren.1 The heir of a man dying in debt was required to surrender the
unpaid for goods included in the succession.

There is practically nothing about the tenure of land in the code, but
another fragmentary law found at Gortyn seems to say that ancestral pro-
perty may only be sold under certain circumstances, and that whosoever
sells or pledges it, does so subject to the risk of having to redeem it for the
family, and compensate the purchaser by repaying twice the price received.2
Another fragment has been found treating of a dispute whether certain
property of an adoptive son was " ancestral " or not, so that the distinction
certainly acted to restrain such transfers.

If the owner of an animal, that was injured by a beast belonging to some
one else, had done all that could be done in " running after " the delin-
quent, he had the choice of either taking the offending animal, or the
price of his own injured beast. But the proviso that he must have done
his best to prevent the mischief suggests a certain disposition among the
persons affected by the law to " Cretize " each other whenever a favourable
opportunity occurred.

The language of the code and other inscriptions seems to show that the
typical citizen was a married householder, who frequented the gymnasium,

1 This clause is reproduced exactly in the French Code Civile. It has been met with
on another fragmentary law inscription, also found at Gortyn, which specifies that the
act of adoption can only be revoked by public proclamation through heralds in the
assembly of the people. (Le droit de sticcession Ugitime en Athenes, E. Caillemer, p. 130,
1879.)

2 Bulletin de Correspondance Helltnique, 1880, p. 468.

P.C. I I

482 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

and belonged to an hetairia or club ; the unmarried youths lived in the
agelae, but all " runners " were competent to take part in civil and political
acts. A person who did not belong to any club was called a^eratpo?, and
the position of such a class was recognised by the code. The law was
made for the householders, who formed the mass of the civil population,
but the noble houses from which the cosmi were chosen probably followed
their own usages, and were not bound by the rules for householders.

There are indications of the rites of interment having been anciently in
the hands of a special class supposed to be of Pelasgian origin ; and on the
feast of Hermes, masters and slaves changed places, and the former were
obliged to take to flight unless they were prepared to obey. If the Roman
Saturnalia, the best known example of this curious custom, was derived
from the Etruscans, we should have no hesitation in deriving both that and
this from the Babylonian Saturnalia, of five days' duration, mentioned by
Athenaeus 1 after Berosus, and now known to be as old as Gudea. Such
an institution is much more congenial to the spirit of a race which is slow
to accept the institution of slavery at all, and requires the consent of the
slave to his own sale or re-capture. The Romans had neither the humour
nor the humanity to invent such a break in the routine of servitude, but
their slaves were naturally more attached to the custom than those of easier
masters, and it would therefore have been impossible to break the tradition
when once established. In Crete it is quite in place and doubtless archaic.

Cretan conservatism shows itself by the retention, even to the present
day, of two peculiar articles of dress mentioned respectively by Galen and
by Aristophanes ; namely, long boots, which may have been originally of
the Hittite pattern, and a short, white, hooded capote. One is also
tempted to recognise in " the special Cretan dish, — a mixture of cheese
and honey," 2 — a relative of the Carthaginian soup praised by Cato. In
the Middle Ages the Cretans accepted the overlordship of the Venetians,
as their ancestors had accepted that of the Dorians ; and even now, after
long periods of oppression, revolts, and raids of extermination, the ancient
gift for association and local self-government is not entirely extinct. The
Demogerontia, a representative council peculiar to the Cretan Christians,
administers charitable properties for widows and orphans under the direc-
tion of the Bishop, and the large amount of self-government conceded by
the Turks since 1878 has " in other ways worked well." 3

If it were certain that the customs of Crete and Sparta belonged to a
wider group of which they were only late survivals, there would be no
reason to suppose Sparta to have borrowed direct from Crete, since both
would be indebted to a common earlier source. The Greeks do not seem
to have had any serious grounds, apart from the resemblance between
them, for deriving one from the other, and there is one real reason in
favour of their independence. There are no traces in Crete of Amazonian

1 Deipnosophists, xiv., c. 447.

2 The Islands of the sEgean, Rev. H. F. Tozer, p. 46.
J Ib.t pp. 60, 76.

CRETE AND SPARTA. 483

customs or traditions. We have seen reason to believe that women
anciently possessed proprietary rights, which were curtailed under Greek
influence, but we hear nothing, as in Sparta, of the special influence or
authority exercised by women in the State. This is equally true of the
Phoenician settlements, and in both cases would be explained by the colony
consisting mainly of seamen, unaccompanied by women of their own stock.

In spite of the interest taken by all Greek writers in the singular institu-
tions of Sparta, we are nowhere told wherein the special powers or privi-
leges of Spartan women consisted ; but their influence being an established
fact, it is one more easily derived from Thessaly by way of Doris, than from
Crete. Aristotle mentions as a fault the freedom of bequest allowed by
Spartan law, and as if in proof of the evil results thence ensuing, adds :
" Nearly two-fifths of the whole country is held by women ; this is owing
to the large number of heiresses, and the large dowries which are custom-
ary." The large dowries were, no doubt, as in Crete and Marseilles, a
reminiscence of times when men endowed their daughters during their own
life, because their nephews inherited after their death. But why there
should be more heiresses in Sparta — where female infanticide was prac-
tised— than elsewhere, is a point that has never yet been explained. The
phenomenon, however, would become intelligible at once, if we suppose
that the freedom of bequest denounced by Aristotle was exercised under
the inspiration of traditions which made heiresses of eldest^ as well as of
only daughters. If, as the inscription of Puteoli seems to show, this was
the custom among the Phoenicians, down to the 2nd century of our era,
without the fact being distinctly understood or reported by classical
writers, such a custom might also have existed in Sparta without our know-
ing it, the rather that it would naturally die out with the families, never
very numerous, of the original citizens.

The son of the daughter who was given in marriage with the inheritance,
on coming of age, succeeded to the property of his maternal grandfather,
and was held to succeed him directly ; but freedom of bequest would have
no tendency to promote the inequality of wealth or the concentration of
property in few hands which was complained of in Sparta. There was no
restriction on slaveholding, which was a possible source of wealth, and the
citizens who were debarred from all useful productive occupations, without
being cured of the desire for wealth, could only gratify their tastes by
unnatural restrictions on marriage. Several brothers had the same wife,
and if she was an heiress, and her son or sons were married in like manner
to the heiress of another house, the two inheritances would be united.

Rawlinson says1 that Lycurgus "is supposed to have forbidden the
subdivision or alienation of lots, entailing them strictly upon the eldest
son, or the eldest daughter, if there were no son ; in the case of childless
persons to have only allowed their lots to be bequeathed to citizens not
possessed of any land ; and in the case of heiresses to have provided
that they should be married only to such persons." All this is so

1 Herod., iii. p. 353.

484 FROM MASS ALIA TO MALABAR.

entirely in accordance with Basque analogies that the suppositions are
extremely credible. But the references given, to ThirlwalPs Greece, Manso's
Sparta, and Miiller's Dorians, are only available as indirect evidence.
Thirlwall writes that wealth was equalized at Sparta "by means of adoptions
and marriages with heiresses, which provided for the younger sons ot
families too large to be supported on their hereditary property. It was then,
probably, seldom necessary for the State to interfere, in order to direct
the childless owner of an estate or the father of a rich heiress to a proper
choice. But as all adoption required the sanction of the kings, and they
had also the disposal of the hands of orphan heiresses, when the father had
not signified his will, there can be little doubt that the magistrate had the
power of interposing on such occasions ... to relieve poverty and
check the accumulation of wealth."

According to Miiller the extinction of families was " provided against by
regulations concerning heiresses, adoptions, introduction of mothaces, and
other means." There was " only one heir, who probably was always the
eldest son," and he, who bore the title of lord of the hearth, was expected
to maintain his juniors. The normal plot enabled the householder to sub-
scribe to the syssitia for three men: "if, however, the family contained
more . . . the means adopted for relieving the excessive number
was either to marry them with heiresses or to send them out as colonists."

The above are quite natural and obvious inferences, but they owe some-
thing to the five "laws" laid down by Manso,1 with a precision not
exactly warranted by his authorities. For instance, the law that childless
persons were bound to bequeath their lots to landless ones is an inference
from the story of Epitadeus in Plutarch's Agis : 2 the abuse he introduced
was the allowing men to bequeath their estates to whom they pleased,
instead of to the person they preferred out of the class indicated by law.
Similarly, the rule that heiresses should be given to men without land
of their own is an inference from Aristotle,3 who says: "As the law now
stands, a man may bestow his heiress on any one whom he pleases," as it
the law had formerly stood otherwise. These passages point to some
restriction which had been removed, but not necessarily to the particular
one inferred. Another inference, which is obviously unsound, is to the
effect that daughters were forbidden to inherit, even if only children, — a
provision which would have rendered all provision for the bestowal of
heiresses unnecessary. It rests only on the passage in Plutarch, which
makes Lycurgus reply to the question, why he commanded daughters to be
given in marriage without dowries, that it was "lest a few should be run
after for their wealth, and others left unmarried because of their poverty."
No giving of dowries would be necessary if all women either inherited land
or married a man who had done so.

What it is really fair to infer from these inferences of scholars, to whom
the idiosyncrasies of Basque family law were unknown, is, that it is not

1 Sparta, vol. i., "Beylagen," p. 129. 2 v. p. 504.

3 Politics, ii. 9, § 15.

CRETE AND SPARTA. 485

possible to conceive, in detail, the working of laws of the traditional
Spartan type, except on the hypothesis of their being associated with
customs of the Basque or Egyptian type.

What M. Revillout calls le serment decisoire was recognised in the Gortyn
code : the female slave's sworn accusation was received against her master,
and a divorced wife, accused of taking away property belonging to her
husband, was entitled to clear herself by oath.1 These are archaic fea-
tures ; but the transitional character of the code is also clearly shown by a
clause which makes it illegal to sell a slave held in pledge "until he who
has deposited him have redeemed him," which shows that slaves were still
mortgaged in the ancient way, but that such securities were no longer
transferable at discretion.

It was held dishonourable for Lacedaemonians to sell land, and forbidden
to sell land anciently possessed ; but as the Helots paid customary dues of
fixed amount, landowners could only be enriched by increasing the amount
of their holding. According to tradition, the whole of the subject population
had been promised the same rights and liberties as were retained by the
Periceci, and the degradation of the Helots was effected subsequently by
force and fraud. They did, in fact, retain some rights of local government,
and their reputation as good seamen is an additional evidence of their con-
nection with the earlier race of Mediterranean navigators.

On the whole, it seems possible to believe in the personal existence of a
legislator like Lycurgus, if we may regard him as a kind of Greek Yeliu-
tache,3 who, finding a mixed, disorganized population at strife, borrowed
the good customs of the numerical majority, and adapted them to the
wants of the band of conquerors, as the Khitai and Mantchus adopted
the code of their Chinese subjects. Such a plagiarism, though rare, is not
absolutely impossible ; the extent to which Plato modelled his ideal com-
monwealth upon Cretan and other alien examples, shows that the excel-
lencies of these States appealed in some way to the imagination of the most
open-minded Greeks ; while at the same time their selection confirms
our view of their non- Hellenic character, since the builders of Utopian
States are apt to use their experience of the imperfect regime under which
they actually live, only as a guide what to avoid. The translator of
Barbosa's description of Malabar3 conjectured that Plato may have
borrowed the family law of his Republic from that of the Nairs, who also
bear a considerable resemblance to his class of Guardians ; and the
undoubted resemblance between Cretan or Spartan and Malayali usage
makes it almost certain that Plato had in his mind a phase of Cretan
custom developed in a direction approaching more or less closely to that
of Malabar.

There is yet one other quarter from whence light may be thrown upon

1 "The Procedure of the Gortynian Inscription." J. W. Headlam, Journ. Hell.
Stud., 1892-3, p. 65 and p. 57 ; also p. 49 for bibliography of inscription.

2 V. post, vol. ii. ch. xiv.

3 A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the beginning of the \6th
century, by Duarte Barbosa. Trans, by the Hon. E. J. Stanley, Hakluyt Society, 1866.

486 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

the existence and character of pre-Hellenic elements in the population of
Sparta. The language both of the Mainotes and the Tzaconians, who are
supposed to be lineal descendants of the ancient Laconians, is said to
retain, even to the present day, elements and forms which are distinctly
non-Hellenic. The vitality of the language shows itself by the fact that
words borrowed from modern Greek are made to follow its peculiar
grammatical forms. And there is a general disposition to regard the hill
shepherds, by whom it is spoken, as representatives of the Cynurians of
Herodotus.1

As M. Deville observes, the parts of Greece, which were always most
backward in comparison, are also those where the ancient language has
undergone least alteration,2 and it is agreed on all hands that Tzaconian, with
its thirty simple consonantal sounds,3 and its singular grammatical forms,
contains elements derived from a period older than any surviving Greek
literature. Thiersch, whose monograph on the subject contains more material
than could probably be collected now, writing in 1835,* not unnaturally
looked for the explanation of its peculiarities to some language " in which
the origines of Greek, Latin, and German still lay together/' i.e. in a hypo-
thetical Pelasgian answering to this description. Dr. Deffner, whose work
seems not to have been completed, thinks it is unnecessary to go further
back than Greek for the explanation of any peculiarities, though an
occasional reference to Latin and its derivatives may be helpful. But the
subject, which is certainly one of great difficulty, can hardly be regarded
as exhausted until it has been treated by one or more of the very small
band of scholars competent to recognise and deal with pre-Hellenic
elements— if such there be — of the authentic Lemnian-Pelasgic order.

The polygonal city walls of the ancient Thyrea were found just en the
borders assigned by Pausanias to the free Laconians, where the dialect is
found surviving. Thiersch describes the people as strong, well made,
intelligent, reliable, and capable of noble feeling. He tells the story of a
youth who received 300 dollars reward for putting out a fire on shipboard,
so as to save the gunpowder, and spent the money in dowering his sister;
a course which local opinion approved, but did not consider exceptionally
meritorious.5 He does not mention any domestic customs; but Manso
says of the modern Mainotes that it is not customary for them to marry
before twenty-five,6 and that there is a strict custom against any meeting of
lovers between betrothal and the marriage ceremony ; which might be the
result of reaction against the opposite archaism. If the wife dies without
children, her dowry reverts to her own family ; but if the man dies, his
wife enjoys his inheritance during widowhood.

2 Etude du dialecte Tzaconien. G. Deville, 1866, p. 130.

3 Zakonische Grammatik. Dr. M. Deffner, 1881, p. 7.

4 Treatises of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences (1835), v°l- *• PP-

5 -#-, P- 573-

6 Sparta, vol. iii. pt. 2, p. 153.

CHAPTER VII.

A SYRIAN LAW-BOOK.

THE resemblances between Cretan and Berber custom are sufficiently
marked to warrant the conjecture that Phoenician and Syrian law and the
Gortyn code might throw light upon each other. We have no information as
to the characteristics of Syrian law ; but a Syro-Roman law-book, ascribed
to the 5th cent. A.D., in spite of its late date and the peremptory
temper of Roman legislators, contains embedded within it traces of
ancient local custom, the strength of which is best evidenced by their
appearance here, in a late summary of Roman law, which — just in virtue
of its non-Roman elements — continued in force for centuries, over a wide
area, even to the exclusion of the Justinian code.

Just as the character of the ancient laws of Minos shows through the
transparent network of Hellenic restrictions, so the peculiarities of Syrian
usage were strong enough to impress their own shape upon a formal
declaration of what was allowed and forbidden by Roman law. The work
seems to have been drawn up by some provincial law practitioner, for the
benefit of his countrymen, much as a native Hindoo might collect
together such provisions of English law as Hindoos are required to obey,
and yet would not obey spontaneously, because of their divergence from
ancient national usage. The learned editors of this work1 regard it
mainly as an exposition of Roman law, adding comparatively little to the
knowledge either of its theory or its practice. But the rules of inheritance
in cases of intestacy differ from all the rest of the code in their complete
divergence from all Roman principles — a divergence which, as they truly
observe, can only be accounted for as the remains of some old system of
popular law, presumably Syrian. Some few other details noted by the
editors as singular, unintelligible, or non-Roman, can also be explained, if
we suppose the local custom surviving in the code to be of the type called
for convenience Hamitic or Alarodian.

At the time of the compilation, Roman law had been so long in force
that its peculiar theory of paternal power had become familiar, but several
passages show that it remained uncongenial. Thus it is stated (§ 44) that
the law makes a man's sons' sons subject to him, but not his daughters'

1 Syrisch-Romisches Rechtsbuch aus dem $ten Jahrhundert. Translated and anno-
tated by Drs. K. G. Bruno and E. Sachau, 1880. One Arab, two Armenian, and
two Syrian texts are given. The oldest Syrian MS. is supposed to come from the town
of Hierapolis, N.E. of Antioch and not far from the Euphrates.

487

488 FROM MASS A LI A TO MALABAR.

sons ; a man has only power over his daughters. Of course to the races
inspired by Egypt and Chaldaea, the Roman idea of "power" is entirely
alien ; but supposing it to be forcibly introduced, all analogy would point
to its being exercised by the maternal grandfather, " the father of my
mother," from whom the Egyptian governor so frequently derived his
hereditary office ; and its restriction to the paternal grandfather had to be
expressly stated. On the other hand, the father's potestas, according to one
text (§ Si), did not entitle him to appropriate gifts or legacies to a son
from his mother's family ; and, by another clause, which the editors
consider to be contrary to all precedent and analogy, legacies from a
stranger to a son under power could not be claimed by his father or grand-
father, though the testator's father or grandfather could bar the legacy by
alleging their own need (§ 54). In other words, a son, whether formally
emancipated or not, had no right to enrich a stranger by his will if his
father or grandfather needed maintenance ; while a father had no right to
prevent his son being enriched by his mother's family, or by strangers if
they pleased, and had no nearer claims.

What may be called the natural rights of the father were by no means
under-estimated, but their recognition is evidently associated with the idea
of the family as a corporation or natural partnership, in which senior and
junior members alike have a vested interest determinable only by death.
Thus the question is raised whether a man can reclaim property the pos-
session of which he has ceded to another. The answer is that a man may
reclaim it from a descendant of his own, but not from a stranger. This at
least is the point meant to be decided, but both the Syrian MSS. use a
remarkable expression : he can reclaim the property if it has been given
to his son, or his daughter, or the children of his daughter (§22). The
Arabic version says, "son or daughter, or the children of his son," and
the editors assume this to be the correct reading ; but when we find the
Nabataeans habitually bequeathing tombs in accordance exactly with the
Syrian formula,1 the obvious conclusion is, not that the two texts in
question need emending, but that the words at least of the old rule
were still sufficiently familiar for them to occur spontaneously to compilers
or copyists.

Failing the father or father's father, the mother's father may be guardian
(§ 6), an encroachment on the rights of paternal uncles which is significant
of the type of usage superseded by Roman law. The mother herself
might be guardian, upon undertaking not to marry again. Traces of the
primitive partnership or community between father, mother, and son are
still visible in the statement that men are not responsible for payments due
by a son, a mother, a father-in-law, or a brother. This, as the editors
observe, is undoubted Roman law, so undoubted that for Romans it would
hardly need to be formulated, while with family groups of the Egyptian type
the presumption is the other way, and mutual responsibility between parents,

1 Post, p. 513.

A SYRIAN LAW-BOOK, 489

children, brothers, and even a wife's parents, is presupposed unless ex-
pressly barred by statute.

The same remark applies to the clause declaring that a free woman can
give her husband power to administer her property, and that a man can do
the same to his son (§31). We have seen that in Egypt, where the pro-
prietary rights of women are largest, their right to alienate property at
discretion for their husband's benefit, or for any other reason, was most
unrestrained ; and the clause shows that by Syrian custom the liberty of
women in this direction was not restricted in the interest of the reversionary
rights of her kinsmen, the " belongings " of Gortyn law. The word used
to describe the powers which a man might give to his son (eTur/QOTros)
implies a degree of authority which the editors of the code think altogether
inappropriate to the relationship ; and, in fact, it is clear that if Syrian
fathers obliged Roman lawyers to recognise their right to designate a son
to act as guardian or trustee for their property, the custom of the country
must have been favourable to such trusteeship as was enjoyed by the
Egyptian prince and heir-son Heqab.1

The readiness to extend the legal idea of agency, characteristic of
Babylonia, seems to have prevailed amongst those for whom this law-book
was written, and they are warned that it is not allowable for a man to let
his slave plead for him in a law-suit, as it would have been by native
custom, following Babylonian precedent. The existence of a former habit
of giving property to wives, and of legislation like that of Marseilles and
Gortyn directed against the habit, is proved by the clause declaring that
a man must not buy goods or land in his wife's name, except out of an
inheritance of her own (§ 43). Such purchases could only be objectionable
if intended as an evasion of the law against internuptial gifts ; a per-
plexing exception is made in favour of a man marrying a widow ; but as it
is inconceivable that the husband's kinsmen should have been more willing
to waive their rights in favour of widows than of maiden brides, perhaps
the case contemplated is that of an heiress married for a second time to a
kinsman of her first husband, who was allowed, as we should say, to settle
her own money upon her, by such a purchase, to prevent her being in a
worse position than the bride given with a marriage portion from her
father.

One clause is of great interest in view of the supposed connection be-
tween the type of usage represented by the Laws of Charondas and Syrian
custom in the widest sense. It states that if a man buys a thing and gives
a sum of money as earnest, if the vendor afterwards declines to deliver, he
must give back twice the earnest ; while if the purchaser recedes from his
bargain, the earnest is forfeited, the earnest serving in each case as a fine
for breach of contract (§ 51). 2

1 Ante; p. 124.

2 See anfe, pp. 443, 449. The editors comment on this as a curious provision, but
see no reason to suspect in it a survival of old Greek or Oriental law ; the case is
altered, however, when Locrian and Khodian precedents are found for it.

490 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

Several passages show the prevalence of antichretic loans or pledges to
which Roman law accords a scant and somewhat grudging toleration.
" When land is pledged on the agreement that the mortgagee shall have the
fruits instead of interest, it is lawful " (§ 99) ; but land which has been given
in possession as a pledge, or sold, cannot be reclaimed after ten years.
Such a limitation is practically fatal to the system of perpetual mortgages,
by which the right of poor proprietors to redeem ancestral land remains
unimpaired in China, Babylonia, and Malabar, from generation to genera-
tion. In these countries, if the original mortgagee wished to get his money
back before the mortgagor was prepared to redeem his land, he could not
foreclose, but simply had to sell his interest, representing something less
than the freehold, to some third person.

Roman influence had prevailed so far, when the law-book was compiled,
that the mortgagee claimed the right to sell after a certain term, and the
conflict of the two tendencies is manifest in another paragraph (§ 107),
which seems also partly inconsistent with the one last quoted. By this,
debts cannot be reclaimed after thirty years; but if a special article or
piece of land had been pledged, and remained in the hands of the original
mortgagee, it can be reclaimed on payment of the original debt. Evidently
local custom was changed for the worse by Roman statute in two particulars ;
the natives apparently had held with the Caucones, the Chinese, and the
Berbers that the moral liability to pay a debt continued indefinitely, though
inability to pay was not severely treated, and Roman law lessened the
obligation previously recognised, by fixing the term of thirty years beyond
which debts were irrecoverable. On the other hand, where native custom
had only allowed a mortgagee to sell his own interest, the law-book,
following no doubt the usage of the Roman courts, contemplates his
selling outright land of which he had not completed the lawful purchase,
since such sale was admitted, after ten years, as a bar to the original
owner's right to redeem on repaying the original loan. The decree of
Halicarnassus discussed above may have been the result of a similar con-
flict of interests.

As in Babylonia, cattle and slaves might be pledged in the same way as
land ; in the case of an ass or horse their labour was counted in lieu of
interest, and the young belonged to the original owner (§ 99). The same
rule applied to slaves and their children. With sheep and goats, the
increase and the wool go to the mortgagee, but the latter has to pay the
expense of herding ; the increase of the flock goes against interest on the
loan, but he has to keep up the original number of the flock pledged.

A clause which the editors dismiss as " too stupid, not to say too mean-
ingless for comment," is to the effect that all crimes are to be punished
according to the degree of criminality (§ 82). But the vague phrase
might be regarded with more respect if we see in it a survival from some
ancient Babylonian counterpart to the much admired generalization,
which fills up all deficiencies in the Chinese code, by stating that all
conduct contrary to the spirit of the laws, if not expressly prohibited, shall

A SYRIAN LAW-BOOK. 491

nevertheless be appropriately punished, that is, in accordance with its
degree of criminality. It is quite certain that the author of the law-book
did not invent anything, however meaningless, out of his own head ; and if
he was reproducing an imperfectly understood legal maxim derived from
an earlier system, it can scarcely have been anything but that suggested by
Chinese analogy.

Another clause forbids the person who has taken a pledge to buy any-
thing from the debtor or mortgagor till the pledge is redeemed, so that
there can be no suspicion of the sale not being voluntary. The editors
think the clause would be strange, even if the prohibition were limited to
the article pledged, and it is of course quite opposed to the spirit of
Roman law. But it is in close harmony with the law of China, — which
expressly forbids a creditor to buy his debtor's land — as is the prohibition
coupled with it, forbidding all commercial transactions between the
governor of a province and the persons under his jurisdiction.1 The pro-
hibition is an exact counterpart to the Chinese law, which forbids officers
to buy land or to marry in the district under their control. And the
same dread of undue influence, exercised under the pressure of commercial
interest, dictates the stringent qualifications required from witnesses whose
evidence is to be accepted in lieu of written deeds.

Such witnesses must be freemen of blameless repute, over twenty-five
years of age, and if the contested transaction took place in the past, not
less than twenty-five at the time of its occurrence ; and they were further
required not to be friends or relatives of the parties concerned, nor
connected with them through any commercial dealings; and besides
bearing witness, they were required to swear that their witness was true
(§ 1 06). It will be remembered that the Gortyn code required the pre-
sence of three freeborn, adult witnesses to give validity to most important
acts ; and both in Egypt and Babylonia the number of witnesses to deeds,
and the judicial weight attached to an oath, show that their participation
was not a mere formality. The Syrian law-book justifies the additional
inference that the witnesses were always a picked class, consisting of
householders whose general character stood high, and whose impartiality
in the particular case could be relied on.

The law of marriage as set forth by the compiler contains several points
of interest, the rather that he describes or alludes to some distinct, not to
say opposite types of usage. All four versions of the text agree in stating
that the portion (or <j>tpvrj) of the bride and the dowry (Swpea) of the
husband should be formally written down. It is said to be the custom in
the west for the two to be exactly equal, but in the east the woman brings
twice as much as the man. Hence the rule which gives both dos and

1 § 65. The word used is ambiguous, and might mean either that he was forbidden to
buy or to sell houses or anything else from or to his subjects ; but the only difference
between the two transactions would be that in the one case a bribe might be disguised in
the form of an excessive price, and in the other as a present in kind, if goods were
ceded in excess of the real value of the price received. Cf. post, p. 527.

492 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

donatio back to the wife if the husband dies, whether there are children or
not ; while if she dies, the husband takes dos and donatio only for the
children's benefit, and if there are no children, he only gets half the dos
in addition to his own donatio. The larger proportion borne by the
woman's contribution in the conservative east is clearly a relic from the
time when family property was transmitted exclusively through women,
while in the west the custom of giving large dowries to daughters was
deliberately put down by statute.1

Besides these two types of marriage settlement, differing only in the
amount contributed by the wife's father, it is explained that there are many
people who do not follow the custom of writings (i.e. marriage settlements)
between husband and wife at all, but betroth themselves simply by agree-
ment 2 and " crowning them with the lauded crown of maidenhood lead
their wives in peace and joy from their parents' house to their own."
Such marriages are not illegal, but the children born of them only inherit
by the custom of the province, and the wife of such a marriage, as in
archaic codes, does not inherit from her husband. The custom of the
province was no doubt variable, and there was probably something in the
local usages, as in Egypt, answering remotely to the Roman distinction
between a wife with dowry and one without. The case is raised of a man
who has married two wives, one with a portion 3 and one without, and it
is said, he may make the children of both marriages alike heirs by will,
but otherwise those of the wife with a portion would take everything.

There was no question as to the legitimacy of the children, but, as in
Egypt the whole of the father's property normally passed to the children of
his " established wife," so here the succession passed to the children of
the wife " with writings," failing testamentary provision to the contrary.
Apparently the freedom of bequest, frequently alluded to, only included
three-fourths of the estate, and the children seem to have had an inextin-
guishable claim to one-fourth, which is also alluded to as a possible
amount for the daughter's portion. The mention of " what the law
gives" in the Gortyn code refers, no doubt, to some equally well-defined
custom.

If the wife's portion included slaves or flocks, in the case of separation
or divorce she takes the original number and half the increase (as the
Gortyn wife retained half her weavings), her husband retaining the other
half (§ 105) — a distinctly non-Roman provision, which the editors can only
suppose to be derived from local custom. It is a custom, however, which
the Gortyn code and the Brehon laws together show to have been at one
time widely diffused. In case of a separation by consent for such a reason
as the wife's infirmity, the husband, who, for old affection's sake, did not
wish to get rid of her altogether (or to surrender her dowry and marriage

1 § 92 and p. 40; Arab. § 51 ; Arm. 45, 46, 50.

2 "irafifaffla : the editors suppose verbal, as distinct from written, contracts to be meant.
§ 93 and § 35.

A SYRIAN LA W-BOOK. 493

portion, as in the case of divorce), was required to provide her with a
separate dwelling-place and an allowance proportioned to her marriage
settlement, like the alimony always promised to Egyptian wives (§ 115).

Egyptian usage on another point is recalled by a very curious section,
which implies the acts of betrothal and marriage to have been separate
and distinct. If a woman has promised to be a man's wife, and her
parents or herself have received a ring or ornaments and gold and other
presents as an earnest for the betrothal, and the man then dies, and his
parents or relatives demand the return of the gifts, what is to be done ?
The book replies : " If a bridal chamber was made for the maiden and
her husband has seen and kissed her," then she keeps half and returns the
rest to his parents and next of kin, but if he has no such near relations
she keeps it all (§91). If, however, the betrothal has been arranged by
relatives, or by writing, and the bridegroom has not seen or kissed his
betrothed, then all the presents are returned.

Now it could never have been in accordance with Oriental ideas of pro-
priety for the bride to be seen or kissed by her betrothed apart from the
marriage ceremony, and the chance of the husband's dying between this
stage and the consummation of the marriage is too remote to have been
provided against by law. If, however, the betrothal and the marriage were
separated by a considerable interval, as among the Kabyles, or if, as
among the Egyptians, there were two stages or degrees of matrimony,
there would be a real possibility of an intended union being broken off by
death. The mention of the bridal chamber seems to imply that the
betrothal might sometimes be equivalent to the Egyptian " taking to wife,"
though it was not always or necessarily so ; and in this case all that would
be wanting to complete the marriage would be the execution of the
writings, or marriage settlement, which converts the betrothed bride into
an " established wife."

As has been already suggested, this interval of legitimate but incomplete
union is a reminiscence of the secret intercourse sanctioned by Spartan
custom. There are three possible arrangements upon marriage ; for the
wife to go and live with the husband's parents, for the husband to go and
live with the wife's parents, and for the husband and wife to form a new
household apart. For the husband to visit his wife openly or secretly,
while she still remains with her own people, is transitional, and probably
a modification of the second type of usage. The duration of this kind
of tentative union would of course be fixed by custom, and after the birth
of children l or the completion of the marriage settlement, the period of
probation ended with the constitution of a new household. The ancient

1 Mr. Tylor considers that the habit of ignoring the husband's existence till the birth
of children, and of naming him (as father of So-and-so) after the first child's birth —
which prevails in some rude races — is associated with the custom of the husband
going to reside with the wife's parents ; and the same association may plausibly be
assumed to have obtained among ancient races of higher civilization. In Armenia,
where the wife is forbidden for a similar term to speak to her relations by marriage, it is
she who is received into an alien community.

494 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

Chinese custom, by which the wife, after a few weeks or months of married
life, returns to visit her own parents, probably represents another mode of
transition, the marriage not being entirely complete, until the bride has
returned to her new home, after having had a physical opportunity of not
doing so. Cashmere folk tales frequently mention this customary visit of
the bride to her parents, which is too common to have originated in mere
complaisance toward the bride's home-sickness.

Of course the paragraph in the Syro-Roman text would not by itself
have suggested any connection with the archaic customs of Spartan or
other barbarism ; but it remains unintelligible unless it is taken to denote
a clear interval between a betrothal which justifies gifts and kisses, and the
complete marriage involving a transfer of property ; while if interpreted in
this sense, it at once connects the local custom described with that of
Egypt and the Liby-Phoenicians.

The law of inheritance as laid down in the book is very interesting.
The rule of succession in case of intestacy is neither purely Roman nor
purely Hamitic ; but the right of a testator to appoint, as heir by will, the
person who would have succeeded by Hamitic law without appointment.,
is expressly stated. If a man's sons pre-decease him, leaving no issue, and
a married daughter also pre-deceases him but leaves sons, the man may, if
he pleases, appoint these daughter's sons to succeed him, even though he
has brothers or brothers' sons living ; but if he does not appoint his
daughter's sons by will, his brothers or nephews succeed (§ 37, 102-4),
and if he has no brothers, his father's brothers or their sons inherit.
When the descendants of his "fathers'5 (i.e. males) are exhausted, the
sons of his daughters and their stock succeed, then the sons of his sisters,
but among these the males alone inherit as long as there are any, and
females only succeed in default of males (§ 104).

Women only inherit in the first degree ; if a man dies, his daughters
inherit with their brothers, and so when a woman dies, after her husband,
all her children inherit equally ; but if the daughters had already received
a portion on marriage, that is counted as a part of their share on the
general division. It seems as if the ancient custom of bequeathing
property to daughters had been too strong for Gneco-Roman influence,
but that in other cases the male line was allowed to take precedence.
Sister's sons, mother's sister's sons, father's sister's sons and their
descendants do not inherit till the male line is exhausted. Failing
descendants from sons or uncle's sons, daughter's sons and father's sister's
sons come in, and failing them the stock of the man's mother, i.e. her
brother's or sister's children, and even perhaps, as in Georgia, her children
by another marriage.

The editors observe that this distinction between female agnates and
cognates is unique, and it can only be accounted for by the grafting of a
strict rule of descent through male agnates upon an equally strict rule of
descent through women. In China, where a similar change of usage must
have taken place at a remote date, one of the tokens of it is the copious-

A SY£IAN LAW-BOOK. 495

ness of the vocabulary distinguishing mother's kin, wife's kin, and
daughter's kin, or three distinct classes of relationship through women.
The Syrian law is sharply distinguished in principle from all the codes
which, after establishing a strict order of precedence among male heirs,
allow women to share indifferently. Jewish law accepts daughters and
their descendants as heirs in default of sons : failing any children, brothers
inherit, but not sisters ; failing brothers, father's brothers, but not father's
sisters, and then other relatives in order of nearness. But of course the
effect of taking the women, in each generation, in default of men, is to
enable a brother's daughter or grand-daughter to exclude a sister's son or
grandson, which is just the opposite of Lycian and Nabataean usage.
Old Syrian custom would appear from the law-book to have been originally
of this type, modified latterly by Greek and Roman influence.

Attention has already been directed 1 to the survival of at least one
trace of archaic custom 'in the text in question, in the paragraph forbidding
compacts of brotherhood, which entail community of property and
earnings, on the ground that wives and children cannot be possessed in
common. The editor observes truly that, " As a rule, a thing is only
forbidden when actually met with in life or attempted 5 " and we have the
less hesitation in recognising traces of the archaic system of female
descent in the law of inheritance when we find domestic communism of
the Nair or Nabataean sort subsisting at this date among some section at
least of the population.

1 Robertson Smith. Marriage and Kinship in Early Arabia, p. 135.

CHAPTER VIII.
ANCIENT ARABIA.

THERE is one point of resemblance for the historian between Arabia and
China, for in both we see the still natural and spontaneous survival of
national life and habits which have endured, without essential change, for
something like four thousand years. Arabia is even the more valuable
monument of the two, for Chinese conservatism, as will be seen, does not
exclude a slow and gradual evolution, while in the more secluded parts
of Arabia, the most civilized tribesmen are still, so far as we can judge, at
exactly the same level as the majority of their ancestors four thousand
years ago.

All travellers insist on the exhilarating qualities of the desert air, and
on the sanitary influence of its intense dryness. The carcasses of dead
camels dry up innocuously by the wayside ; the Arab tent is innocent even
of fleas;1 at Sana, nearly in the same latitude as Senegal, the mediaeval
geographer, Hamdani, recorded as a marvel that meat would keep good for
three or four days in the butchers' shops ; and, in general, the Bedouin are
exempt from all those human ills which modern science traces to the
multiplication of microbes in damp-bred decay. Life in pure, dry air, such
as desert tribes enjoy as fully as Alpine mountaineers, conduces to the
vigour of the race, which does not depend for its vitality on renewal from
without ; while the increase of population, for which there is no room at
home, overflows sometimes in the shape of conquering hordes, sometimes in
a more pacific, perennial stream of emigrant traders. The Arab does not
change at home, because men of his race carry with them from the desert
a physique that fits them for a kind of roving dominion over nearly half
the globe, and because such roving has been a habit with them since
before the dawn of history.

The remains of primitive, archaic custom to be met with in South Arabia
and the parts of East Africa colonized from thence are presumably earlier
than the similar remains to be found west of Syria and Asia Minor. If
Egypt was settled by a people proceeding from Babylonia or any adjoining
part of Asia, by way of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, it is certain, a
priori, that such a people could hardly fail to touch, on their way, and leave
settlements at various points on the coast of Arabia. Yet it would have
been thought rash to claim, without positive evidence of any kind, an
antiquity of over 3,000 years for imaginary kingdoms in Oman, Hadramaut,
and Yemen.

1 This praise does not extend to Yemen, according to Mr. Harris : A [ottrney through
Yemen, p. 205.

496

ANCIENT ARABIA. 497

The earliest record which confirms the argument from the nature of
things is a Sixth Dynasty Egyptian inscription, which refers to a Fifth
Dynasty expedition to " the Land of Pun," whence a Denga dwarf was
brought back for King Assa.1 And it shows that already the east coasts of
the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, opposite the south-west corner of
Arabia, had begun to receive the stream of population from the Arabian
peninsula, which has flowed almost continuously ever since.

The precise character and affinities of the earliest Arab population is
to a certain extent an open question ; and it is not very material whether
they are described as pre-Semitic or proto-Semitic, or even whether they
are called Semites, Hamites, or Cushites, provided it is understood that
the Semitic type of language originated with them, presumably soon after
the ancestors of the Egyptians had carried off to Africa their less developed
but kindred form of speech. Professor Hommel divides the Semites into
two branches : those of Babylonia and Assyria and an earlier Syro-Phcenico-
Arab branch, the earliest member of which, necessarily, stands nearest to
any common ancestry, which may connect it either with Hamites or the
primitive stock of Central Asia represented by the Sumerians. Some
Semitic scholars are disposed to derive Chaldaean civilization from South
Arabia, among other reasons, because Ea, the Babylonian culture god, is a
water deity, whose sanctuaries were placed upon the Persian Gulf. But
Ea's wateriness might be explained as elemental rather than geographical,
or, even if geographical, might only mean that the primitive Tatar stock had
found culture when it descended to the river mouth. Any way, the men
who invented writing must be regarded as the true founders of primitive
civilization ; and Babylonia and Egypt not only developed their several
systems before South Arabia, but the latter was — so far as we know — some-
what tardy even in borrowing the characters in which the earliest South
Arabian inscriptions are written.

§ i. THE KINGDOMS OF MA.'IN AND SABA.

Until recently the so-called Himyaritic inscriptions, found in Yemen
and Hadramaut, were all supposed to begin at about the date of the
Assyrian inscriptions which mention conquests in Arabia ; and the kings
of Saba and Ma'in were supposed by the chief authority on this subject 2 to
have been rivals and contemporaries. With much industry and ingenuity,
Professor Miiller arranged the thirty-three kings of Saba and the twenty-six
of Ma'in, whose names were known a dozen years ago, so far as possible,
in genealogical order and chronological groups ; and the greater part of
this work stands good, though his estimate of the relations of the two
kingdoms must be revised.

The inscriptions brought from Northern Arabia by Euting, in 1884,

1 See ante, p. 22 n. : his function was to "dance the god " (? Bes).

2 Die Burgen ^^nd Schlosser Sudarabiens, by D. H. Miiller (published originally in
the Sitzungsberichte d. Phil. hist. Classe d. kais. Akad. d. Wissenschafteri). Wien, vols. 94,
97 (1879, 1881).

P.C. K K

493 FROM MASSAL1A TO MALABAX.

besides those of the Nabataean period to be discussed later, included some
in the Minaean character and dialect found at El Ala — about half-way
between Teima and Khaiber, somewhat to the west of both. This evidence
of the wide range of the Minaean power remained simply perplexing till Dr.
E. Glaser, the most enterprising and successful collector of Arabian inscrip-
tions, was enabled to correct and supplement Miiller's grouping of the
Sabaean kings by the discovery that the Minsean inscriptions, as a class,
were older than those of Saba, and that, in fact, the two sets of inscriptions
only overlapped during the fall of the kingdom of Ma'in and the rise of
that of Saba.1

The main arguments, derived from the inscriptions themselves, for
regarding the two periods as successive are that the dialect and character of
the Minaean ones is the more primitive ; that, with few exceptions, neither
series contains mention of engagements with or victories over the other ;
that the inscriptions of each are found in the midst of territory which,
according to every geographical probability, must have belonged to the
other; that the gods regularly invoked are entirely different in the two sets;
and that none of the Minaean inscriptions are dated (except by eponyms),
while many of the Sabaean ones are dated by an era beginning, most
probably, 115 B.C. Minaean coins, again, are unknown, while Sabaean
ones, beginning with the 5th cent. B.C., are fairly numerous.

Inferences favourable to the same view may be drawn from the silence
of other authorities ; thus the Minaean names of places are unknown to
Arab literature and tradition, while those of most Sabaean cities are
preserved, and early Arab poets illustrate the fugitiveness of earthly great-
ness by the ruin which has overtaken those mighty places and their lords :
"Who is safe against the changes of destiny, after the kings of Sirwah
and Mareb? " ^Elius Gallus again, though passing through Mincean
country, is said to destroy Sab&an towns. Other classical writers speak
rather of a Minaean country than a Minaean kingdom, and the only serious
argument on the other side — that Eratosthenes speaks of the Minaeans on
the Red Sea, whose chief city is Kama, as being under kings, like the
Sabaeans and other chief nations of Arabia — is met by Dr. Glaser, who
observes that the districts where Minaean inscriptions abound are in no
sense on the Red Sea, but in the Djauf country ; and it is a fair inference

1 The latest literature on this subject is virtually inaccessible to English readers,
as it consists of a pamphlet of 100 pages by Dr. Glaser, printed for private circulation,
containing the first six chapters of the first (historical) volume of his Skizze der Geschichte
und Geographic Arabiens von den altesten Zeiten bis ztun Propheten Muhammad, of which
the second volume (on the geography) was published in 1890 : of a review of this work
by Prof. Fritz Hommel, reprinted from the Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 291, 1889: and
(by the same author), Aufsdtze and Abhandlungen Arabische-Semitischen Inhalts., 1892.
There is a review of Glaser in the Transactions of the Imperial Academy of Vienna,
by Dr. Mordtmann -(vol. 44, p. 173 ff. ), but most of the other articles on both sides are
somewhat superfluously contentious. I am indebted to the kindness of Prof. Sayce
for the use of the first sheets of the historical sketch, and the matter of the following
pages is based so completely on the three sources above mentioned that one general
reference to them may suffice, though it should be added that they also contain many
interesting details scarcely alluded to here. For the bibliography of the subject see Sud-
Arabische Chrestomathie, Dr. Fritz Hommel, Munich, 1893.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 499

that Eratosthenes' information was second-hand and out of date, seeing that
Karnu, the modern Es Souda, which he makes the capital, was, any way,
only the third in importance of the Minaean towns, after Ma'in itself and
Jathil, the modern Barakis. There is no mention of the Minaeans .in
Assyrian inscriptions, though Assurbanipal, circ. 645 B.C., boasts of over-
coming Abijateh, king of the Arabians — a name evidently identical with the
Abijada of Minaean dynasties ; but the Assyrian conquerors are lavish
with the title of king in their triumphal tablets, and the earlier royal
houses might be represented at this date by chiefs of little importance.

Another negative argument is supplied by the silence of the genealogical
table in the tenth chapter of Genesis, where Saba is, and Ma'in is not
mentioned, so that the latter was presumably not known in Palestine,
either when the passage was first written or when the book was last edited.

The scriptural references to Maonites, or Meunites, have been exhaustively
discussed by Prof. Hommel. In Judges x. 12 the Maonites are reckoned
among the enemies from whom Jehovah has delivered the Israelites, and
the Septuagint has Midianites, an alternative which has some bearing on
the question of the locale assigned to the Maonites by tradition.

Again, in 2 Chronicles iv. 41, some readings have Meunites for "the
habitations " of the Authorized Version, as the people destroyed by the
posterity of Simeon. Here, and in subsequent passages, Hommel supposes
the chronicler, who writes long after the fall of Ma'in, to introduce an
almost forgotten name in order to display his antiquarian learning ; but
even in Chronicles there is the possibility of early sources being drawn
upon, and v. 40 of the same chapter has a curious resemblance to phrases
in the i8th chapter of Judges, which is counted among the most ancient
passages of that book. The Simeonites, as they went to seek pasture for
their flocks, like the children of Dan, when they came "to a people quiet
and secure," found " the land was wide, and quiet, and peaceable ; for
they of Ham had dwelt there from of old" Whatever authority the
chronicler followed, it is noticeable that in this place he treats the
Meunites as a civilized and pacific stock.

In 2 Chronicles xx. i, several versions of the text read " certain of the
Meunites," instead of " others beside the Ammonites," for the allies of
Ammon and Moab against Jehosaphat, and in the same place the Targum
has Edomites, and the Septuagint Minaeans. In 2 Chronicles xxvi. 7, the
Mehunims, also read Meunites, are bracketed with the Arabians of Gur-
Baal (Petra?) and the Philistines, subdued by Uzziah ; and in the next
verse the Septuagint has Meunites for Ammonites, as those who gave gifts
to Uzziah when " his name went abroad even to the entering in of Egypt."
In yet another passage (Job ii. u) the Septuagint calls " Zophar the
Naamathite," the "king of the Minseans." But when the scantiness and
uncertainty of these references is compared with the frequent recurrence
of allusions to the Sabaeans, it certainly appears that the Old Testament
writers knew much less of the Minaeans than might have been expected,
had they flourished contemporaneously with the kingdoms of Israel and

500 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

Judab. There were kings that " reigned in the land of Edom before there
reigned any king over the children of Israel ; " l and in the book of Job,
the first spokesman of earthly wisdom is a Temanite, while the Hebrew
prophets refer to the wisdom of Edom and the understanding of the
mount of Esau as no less notorious than the wealth of Tyre and Sidon.
"Is wisdom no more in Teman? Is counsel perished from the prudent?
Is their wisdom vanished?"2 But the communities thus alluded to have
left no traces yet discovered in secular history.

On the other hand, the references to some Arab kingdom of Ma'inites
are no more likely to be without an historical foundation than the story of
the queen of Sheba. The connection between Judaea and Yemen turns
upon the fact that the terminus for the land trade of Arabia with the west
was situated at Gaza. When that city was in the hands of the Assyrians,
an Arabian queen and a Sabaean king sent presents to Sargon, and when it
was in the hands of the king of Jerusalem, nothing is more likely than
that a queen of Saba sent an embassy with gifts to Solomon. But the
Maonites appear in a quite different light, as an Hamitic people of
Northern Arabia and the entering in of Egypt, regarded as assailants by the
Israelites, because they resist their encroachments, and more or less
connected or confused with the Midianites.

In the two versions of the story of Joseph,3 the wandering merchants
who would sell a slave into Egypt are variously described as Ishmaelites
and Midianites. Ishmael, as a proper name, occurs frequently in Minsean
inscriptions, and, whether it be possible to connect the names of Midian
and Ma'in or no, the discovery of Minsean inscriptions as far north as El
Ala shows that the influence of the former people extended to the country
occupied by Midianites. A very important inscription (Halevy 535) seems
to show that Ma'inite enterprise reached to within the frontiers of Egypt.
It is one of the few in which Saba is mentioned, and should therefore
belong to the latter years of the monarchy.

It records the erection and dedication to the god Attar of a fortified
watch-tower, by two princes of Jafan and Daflan, " lords of Sar and Asur,
and Ibru-naharan," in memory of their escape from a ghazu of Saba and
Khaulan upon the caravan road between Mawan and Raghmat; their
escape during a war between the lords of the northern and the southern
land,, and again " from Misru when there was strife between Madhi and
Misru," and their safe return within the borders of their city Karnawu.
Dr. Glaser and Prof. Hommel independently came to the conclusion that
Misru must mean Egypt, and, given the presence of Ma'inites in Midian, it
seems a waste of ingenuity to seek for any less obvious meaning. A less
obvious but equally probable identification is that of Sar and Asur
respectively with the famous Egyptian border fortress Tar, the key of the
defences against the desert tribes, and with the Ashurim (Gen. xxv. 3),
whom the Hebrew genealogist counts as a son of Dedan.

1 Gen. xxxvi. 31. 2 Jerem. xlix. 7. Obad. viii. 9.

3 Gen. xxxvii. 25, 28.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 501

The three names go very plausibly together, and if an Egyptian fortress
actually was placed under an Arab governor, the phenomenon is only
surprising from its date : later history shows us the same stock providing
ministers to foreign monarchs and distant countries, as far east as China,
and as far west as Spain ; and every fresh discovery in the history of these
ancient kingdoms only goes to show that their relations were in all ways
more modern than has been suspected hitherto. The third name,
Ibru-naharan, may be read "the shore," or, "the further bank of the
stream," and might refer either to the ancient canal, half-way across the
isthmus of Suez, or to either of the gulfs at the head of the Red Sea.
Another inscription (Hal. 578) found at Barakis (Jathil) speaks of " Misran
and Ma'in of Misran . . . with the waters of them both," as if there
were a Ma'in of Egypt, an offshoot from the Ma'in of Southern Arabia, and
the littoral rights of the near neighbours may have been denned by treaty.
There are other inscriptions referring to treaties of alliance, and praising
the observance of agreements.1

Too many difficult and doubtful questions are raised by these inscriptions
for us to treat anything as demonstrated, except the fact of political inter-
course between Egypt and Yemen, and of an alliance between some
branch of a Yemenite stock and some ruler (probably, no doubt, a Semitic
invader) within the delta of Egypt. The inscription which establishes
these facts concludes by invoking Attar of Sarkan, Attar of Jarhak, the
lady of Nask, the divinities of Ma'in and Jathil, Abijada Jathi, king ot
Ma'in, and the two sons of Madikarib, son of Hi Japaa, and the tribes of
Ma'in and Jathil ; the authors of it, here named as Ammi-sadik, and Sad,
and Mainu Misran — a place which thus seems to denote the two lords of
Sar, Asur, and Ibru-naharan — place their property and their inscriptions
under the protection of the gods of Ma'in and Jathil, and of the kings of
Ma'in and Mawan, against whomsoever might destroy or remove the
inscriptions.

It is fair to ask — though it might be premature to answer — the further
questions, whether Mawan may be the same as the Magan of Gudea, and
whether the land of Men, and the people of Mentiu— the Bedouin whose
defeat by Senoferu is commemorated in his Sinai inscriptions — have any-
thing to do with Ma'in. It is already clear that the monuments of Arabia
promise to do no less than the foreign correspondence of Thothmes and
Amenophis, to show that there are still many unsuspected chapters, in the
history of the ancient comity of nations, among whom Assyria was the
last born and shortest lived.

1 Hal. 192. Burgen und Schlosser, p. 1025. One of the Minsean inscriptions records
how Alman, son of Ammkarib of ... father of Jansil, and Jad-Kuril, and Sadil,
and Wahabil, and Jasmail, the tribe of Gabaan, the friends of Abjada Jati, King of
Ma'in, founded and built and dedicated (to Attar and two other gods) the whole execution
and decoration of six (?; watch-towers and six towers in the walls of the city Qarnu, from
the tower which his (?) body guards built to the ... of the town, etc., as tokens of
reverence for Attar, the divine judge. The inscription closes with the thanks of the
King and mizwad of Main to Alman "for his faithfulness and adherence to what was
agreed (?) towards his god, and his patron, and his king, and his tribe in war and peace. "

502 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

Thirty Minaean kings' names have been found, and Dr. Glaser's estimate
of 750 years for the duration of the dynasty is based on an estimate of 25
years to a reign. It is, however, common for father and son to be
associated on the throne, and there are examples of brothers also reigning
together or in succession, both circumstances tending to shorten the
average duration of the single reign, while in authentic lists so high an
average is never kept up for centuries. Against this we have to set the
unknown periods occupied by kings whose inscriptions have not been
found, and kings who did not set up any, to say nothing of intervals during
which no tribal chief was in a position to call himself king. Certain titles,
Jati, the Deliverer, Rijam, the Exalted, and others recur in addition to the
various royal names, and may perhaps supply a clue to some arrangement
of dynasties, while the genealogies of royal houses, found to be successive,
might throw light on the length of interregnums, the recurrence of which
follows almost necessarily from the conditions of rulership in Arabia.

If Ma'in of Egypt was inhabited from of old by the sons of Ham, the
first civilized settlers of Southern Arabia will have had the same descent,
unless they were still more nearly akin to the men of Eridu and Sirgulla;
and with the latter, the earliest state is the city, under a city king, who
worships a city god. But the men of the desert are scarcely, if at all, less
ancient than the town-dwelling traders. And, now as then, the oases of
size and fertility sufficient to support a large town are separated by such
long reaches of barren desert that the trade and prosperity of the city
are at the mercy of the desert tribes, who are both more warlike and more
secure against attack than the citizens. It is very difficult for a city king
to control the desert tribes, while under the protection of a tribal chief,
the citizens can go their own way in peace and content. The chief, who
receives tribute from a number of cities, is as much of a king as the
climate of Arabia can well produce ; but personal qualities count for so
much in the leadership of the tribes, that authority does not remain long
fixed in one house, or localised in one capital. All that can be said is
that the chief tribe tends to furnish kings, who choose their capital city
from among the chief of those under their protection ; while the strength
of the monarchy fluctuates with the personality of the ruler, and his
success in commanding the loyalty of the towns — and this depends on the
completeness with which he can put down unlicensed brigandage by the
tribes; while again his command of the tribes turns upon his wealth in
peace, and his fortune and audacity in war.

According to Dr. Glaser, the petty chief of the present day who sees
his way to a successful ghazu, a foray like that of Saba and Khaulan on
the caravan road, uses the phrase: "We will make ourselves a little
kingdom ; " and the ancient princes of Ma'in and Jathil and Saba and
Raidan represent the small number of sovereign kings acknowledged by a
plurality of cities and tribes. Such rulers as Sayyid Said, Feysul, and Ibn
Rashid, whose government has been described b% Wellsted, Palgrave, and
Blunt, probably give the best idea attainable of the character of early

ANCIENT ARABIA. 503

Arabian kingdoms. As, in the cities of Sumer and Akkad, the king and
god of the city were invoked on every contract tablet, so the market women
of Riad in the iQth century naturally asseverate to the stranger cheapening
their dates : " By him who protects Feysul, I am the loser at that price ! "
" By him who shall grant Feysul a long life, I cannot bate it." l

The earliest Minaean kings bear the title Mizwad, Prince, as the earlier
group of Sabaean rulers are called Makarib — apparently from a semi-
priestly office. 2 Ma'in is situated in one of the best watered and most
fertile districts of Arabia : there are still traces of an ancient network of
regular irrigation canals, and an abundant rainfall even now enables three
harvests to be gathered in a year. The citadel consists of huge squared
stones, laid without cement but perfectly fitted, with towers at intervals.
But the general character of the architectural remains of Minaean edifices,
as well as the matter of their inscriptions, need not be considered sepa-
rately from those of Saba. The change of capital does not necessarily
imply any greater revolution in Southern Arabia than the substitution of a
Theban for a Memphite dynasty in Egypt.

The commercial importance of the earlier stages on the road from the
mouth of the Euphrates to the cities of Yemen must have been relatively
greatest before the latter reached their prime ; and without attempting to
date the earliest commercial settlements on the east and south-east coasts
of Arabia, it may be said in general terms that it must have been here,
rather than in any other land, that " the actual centre of the world's com-
merce— by which the products of all Southern Asia and East Africa were
transported to Egypt and Babylonia, to say nothing of Assyria — was to be
found." 3 Long before Tyre and Sidon were thought of, cities for trade
flourished upon the gulf of Katar, and the island and bay of Bahrein ; and
the caravan roads, which still take their start to cross the very centre of
Arabia from El Yemamah to the west or north-west, towards Teima,
Khayber, or Mecca, all most probably originated when the ports of those
deserted shores were filled with sea-borne merchandize. Primitive Arab
religion consisted in making pilgrimages to sacred spots, walking round
sacred stones or monuments, and burning incense ; 4 and the world-wide,
immemorial use of incense in religious worship elsewhere must have begun
after the colonization of the incense coast of South Arabia. A religious
or semi-religious demand, like that of worshippers for incense or ernbalmers
for spices, is the most constant and peremptory of any, as the opening of
the caravan routes through Arabian deserts proves. The name of Keturah,
the wife who bears to Abraham the eponyms of the great trading tribes of
Arabia, means incense. The Midianites6 and Dedanites, as well as the

1 Narrative of a Year 's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, by W. Gifford
Palgrave, i. 439.

2 The Sabaean mikrab or makrab means "temple" (cf. the old name for Mecca,
Makoraba), and Dr. Glaser proposes to connect all three with kariba, "to bless."

3 Glaser, vol. ii. p. 85. 4 Osiander, Z.D.M.G., vii. 475.

5 Hommel note3 also the names of the sons of Midian, Epha (Ass. Ghaipa, ? Ghaifa
between Mecca and Medina) and Abidah, cf. Abijada, as a name of Minaean kings.

504 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

Sabaeans, acted as traders on their own account, besides serving, like the
modern Bedouin, as convoys and carriers; and it is to stocks of this
generation or stratum that the chronicler refers as " sons of Ham " when
describing their mode of life.

The inscriptions from Hadramaut, with the exception of the late Sabsean
one of Hisn Ghorab, are mostly in the Minaean dialect;1 and, though as yet
Oman has scarcely contributed to the inscriptions, Deecke considers that
the differences and resemblances of the "Himyarite" and Indian characters
are just such as to demand a common parentage at some intermediate
stage, such as Oman.2 Dr. Glaser's estimate of the antiquity of the
Minaean monarchy thus harmonizes with every consideration of outside
probability, and it must even be exceeded to allow of the " land of Pun "
being settled before King Assa's day, from South Arabia in the Minaean
age, just as Abyssinia was settled in the age of Sabsean kings. The ebb
and flow of power and population has repeated itself with singular mono-
tony, and the fuller light now thrown on the history of Saba has a double
value as illustrating the degree of intercourse with its nearest neighbours
by sea and land, which South Arabia probably kept up before Saba became
a kingdom.

The longest of the inscriptions found is one, not yet translated (Gl. 1000),
which commemorates the final victory over Ma'in of a Sabaean makarib,
Karibail Watar, after which the Sabaeans begin to take the title of king.
Some of the principal monuments of Sirwah and Mareb were erected
before his time, and the peculiar characteristics of South Arabian fortifica-
tion and architecture were already developed. Wellsted's description of the
Nakb el Hajar fortress, being accompanied by a sketch, is still the most
instructive,3 and the Hisn el Ghorab and other inscriptions, which mention
all the several portions of the forts erected by their authors, show that the
same type was habitually followed.

The Nakb el Hajar is a large hill fortress between 40 and 50 miles from
the coast in the west of Hadramaut, a district which may well have been
densely populated in the past, as Wellsted counted 30 villages in the space
of 15 miles. A wall between 30 and 40 feet high is carried round the hill
at about one-third from the base, guarded by square towers at equal distances.
There are only two entrances, opposite each other on the north and south,
flanked with towers, 14 feet square, on each side. The space between
these, forming an oblong platform, was roofed with large flat stones ; and
as no trace of steps could be seen, it is possible that the interior was
approached only by removable ladders. The walls consist of carefully
hewn marble; the lower slabs 5 to 7 ft. long by 2 ft. 10 ins. to 3ft. thick
and 3 to 4 ft. broad, the size of slab decreasing towards the top, so that the
thickness of the walls decreases from 10 to 4 ft. ; within the walls an
oblong temple, with walls 27 and 17 yds. respectively in length, also
remains.

1 Z.D.M.G., xxxvii. 392. 2 /£., xxxi. 612.

3 Travels in Arabia in 1835-6, by Lieut. S. R. Wellsted. 1838.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 505

Somewhat further west, between Haura and Makalla, are the remains of
Hisn Ghorab, with an inscription dated 640 of the unexplained Sabsean
era, and probably about 525 A.D., which records, not the erection but the
occupation or garrisoning1 of the city or fortress Mawijat, "its walls and
cisterns and approaches " (or ascents), on occasion of some conflict between
Himyarites and Abyssinians. Wellsted, the discoverer, describes the tower
on a height, with houses round, tanks excavated in the solid rock and
cemented inside, and the approach by a path hewn in the rock and only
wide enough to admit one person at a time. The standing features of the
Arabian stronghold are these : a naturally isolated rocky elevation with a
surrounding wall, water cisterns, a steep and narrow approach, a level,
oblong platform, a gallery or passage between wall and parapet, and a
temple within the walls. Such works could not of course be executed in a
sudden emergency, so the inscription must refer to a particular defence of
an old, and perhaps long-disused stronghold.

At Neswa, or Nizzuwah, in Oman, Wellsted found a circular fort of
which the structure is the more interesting because it is possible to see in
it the germ and explanation of the platform so frequently mentioned.
The diameter of this fort was estimated at nearly 100 yards, and to the
height of about 30 yards it had been filled up by a solid mass of earth and
stones ; seven or eight wells had been bored through this, "from several of
which they obtain water/'2 using the dry ones as magazines; the total height
is about 150 feet, and the traveller, who rightly judged the work to be "of
considerable antiquity," declared it to be almost impregnable, except by
starvation or mining, since even artillery could make little impression on a
building that was, so to speak, all wall. The conception seems to be the
same as in the case of the nuraghs, only carried out on a much grander
scale. Hamdani speaks of the paved terrace of the castles, worn by the
feet of many years ; and his account of the traditional marvels of Ghoum-
dan, the ancient fort of Sana, almost tempts us to conjecture that the
Arabian fort was an adaptation of the zigurrat or step pyramid idea, as the
nuragh may have been a feeble survival or copy of the Arabian fort. There
were twenty stories or terraces, with a space of 10 ells between each
storey, in this building, said to be the most ancient in Yemen ; and its four
faces were built of red, black, green, and white stones respectively.3

Sana is watered from Shibam, a mountain at twenty-four hours' distance,
with streams springing from the rock. The same writer describes the
hollows in the rock and "terrible castles" thereon; there is only one gate
in the wall, approached by a road, zigzagging up the mountain, hewed
alternately like a ladder out of the living rock and built up with stones,
carried by bridges or vaults over clefts, the ascent from the foot to the
citadel taking three hours. Some special sanctity evidently attached to
paved ways between town and temple ; the town of Taiz, which is sur-
rounded by pre-Islamitic remains, — a staircase of well-hewn stones without

1 Z.D.M.G., xxxix. 230. Glaser, i. 7. 2 L.c., i. p. 121.

3 Burgtn und Schlosser, p. 352.

506 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

cement, watercourses, etc., — has a paved road leading from the chief gate to
the plain of Taiz, and the modern Arabs curse the infidels as they pass it.1
And a still more curious parallel to Leuco-Syrian custom is furnished by an
inscription of Karibail the Wise, son of Jataamir, telling how he extended
the city of Nask by "sixty measures of length to these divine images."2

The elliptical temple at Mareb, called by the Arabs Haram Bilkis, also
has gates on the north and south only, which leads Miiller to speculate
whether the whole enclosure at Nakb el Hajar was of a sacred character ;
but, as he truly observes,3 Raubritterthum and Priesterthum were so closely
associated among the early Arabs that it is difficult to distinguish between
martial and sacred uses. Minsean inscriptions show that city walls were
mainly built with temple funds. The city god was no doubt considered
to be interested in the safety of his town, and so forts were built in honour
of the gods and with temple revenues, as well as from tithes and taxes, or
the offerings of loyal subjects, while priests as well as princes build walls
to be dedicated to the gods.

Jedail Dirrih, the son of the first makarib, is the first of the Sabseans to
whom great works can be assigned. He built a wall round the city of Mareb,
and the size of this earliest enclosure points to a town of already ancient
standing. He began the Haram Bilkis, and surrounded Avvwam, a sanc-
tuary frequently mentioned in the inscriptions, with a wall, sacrificing to
Attar and invoking the protection of Almakah ; he also built a fortress
Jasbum and the great temple of Almakah at Sirwah : the latter probably
was undertaken first, as it was finished, and the Mareb temple possibly
only begun, by Jedail. Mareb probably succeeded Sirwah as the capital,
on account of the barren site of the latter; but even Mareb was unable in
its natural condition to support the increased population brought to it by
its growing political importance, and hence the necessity for the erection
of its famous dyke.

Only three Europeans have succeeded in reaching the spot in modern
times — Arnaud, Halevy, and Glaser — the last of whom owed his success at
starting to an impression he had succeeded in conveying, that he was
employed by the Turkish Government to report on the possibility of restor-
ing the dyke. The work, though finely conceived and executed, was so
far facilitated by nature that it cannot rank in point of scale with the irriga-
tion works of Egypt and Babylonia ; but in Arabia, where the area under
irrigation is generally small, it appeared as wonderful as beneficent. Two
mountains, the last eastern spurs of the Yemen range, narrow the valley of
the Adana river to 600 paces. In the rainy season the stream, which has
many tributaries, is sometimes impassable for two months. The water
was held back by a dam of earth faced with pebble, but the existing
remains belong rather to the side walls of the lock or sluice gates, which

1 Z.D.M.G., xix. 236.

2 Z.D.M.G., xxix. 601. Cf. ante, p. 419 n., and Religion of the Semites, p. 156. In
Canaan "towns were built on rising ground, and the well lay outside the gate, usually
below the town, while the high place stood on the higher ground overlooking the human
habitations." 3 L.c., 340 ff. Cf. Hos. vi. 9.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 507

are of hewn stone or masonry. There are two inscriptions on the dyke,
by Samahali Jenuf, son of Damarali, and Jethaamar Bajjan, son of Samahali
Jenuf. One made the canal or sluice Rahab, and the other the canal
Hababidh ; every temple, watch-tower, or fortress of Minaeans and Sabaeans
had a proper name, and canals and tanks were christened in the same way
by their founders, as the gates, canals, and statues of Babylonia and Egypt
were. The inscription of Jethaamar seems the elder, so Dr. Glaser supposes
there to have been two Samahali Jenufs.

Probably not very long after the lower parts of the temple were erected
by the Makarib Jedail Dirrih, an Ilsarh, king of Saba, son of Samahali
Dirrah, king of Saba, dedicated the whole "filling up" of the Haram Bilkis
to Almakah (Gl. 485, Arnaud 55). And if this Samahali Dirrah is identical
with . . . ali Dirrah, Makarib of Saba and son of the Makarib
Jedail, he would be the last Makarib and first king. His successor Ilsarh
is succeeded by his brother, Karibail, who may or may not be identical
with the Karibail Watar of the great Sirwah inscription. An apparently
ancient boustrophedon inscription favours the identity, but in all these
genealogies there are chronological difficulties which would be most easily
cleared up if fresh discoveries showed the same name and title to be
repeated in different generations.

Tafidh, which Dr. Glaser proposes to identify with Sana, is mentioned
among the forts which the Makarib Karibail Watar, son of Damarali,
" destroyed, plundered, and burnt." The Sabaeans drove the lord of Tafidh
to the sea coast; but the citadel of Sana — if this be it — was restored by the
kings, as it ranks with the temples of Sirwah and Mareb and the mosque
Shibam among the best preserved of ancient Arab works. The erection
of double bronze doors for the Sarhat of Tafidh is dated in the reign of
Wahbil Jahiz, and these gates, which Dr. Glaser believes to occupy their
original place, are still in the great mosque of Sana. They belong to the
dawn of that extension of the Sabaean empire which showed itself in the claim
of the kings to rule over Raidan, — of which the poet sings, " my citadel in
Zafar ... in the green plain, where are eighty dams which bestow
streams of water," — in addition to Saba. A fixed point in the chronology will
be established whenever it is possible to identify one of the kings Jethaamar
with "Itamara the Sabaean," who paid tribute to Sargon in 715 B.C.

Meanwhile each inscription that groups a few kings contributes to
narrow the range of conjecture, and so brings at least negative certainty a
degree nearer. An inscription found outside the Haram Bilkis (Gl. 481,
Arn. 56) was set up by a noble priest of the goddess dat Ghadhran, who
calls himself vassal (?) of three kings, and dedicates parts of the wall to
Almakah in terms similar to those used by King Ilsarh. The priest com-
memorates the conclusion of peace between Saba and Kataban, after a war
of five years, in which the god protected Saba and its tribes. The inscrip-
tion concludes with invocations of the gods and of four kings, — viz., Jedail
Bajjan, Jekrubmalik Watar, king of Saba, Jethaamar Bajjan, and Karibail
Watar— always in this order. Another inscription expressly calls Jedail

5o8 FROM MASSALTA TO MALABAR.

Bajjan a son of Karibail Watar, and another names Jedail and Jekrubmalik
as reigning together, while the priest speaks of the two latter as his contem-
poraries, giving the title of king to Jekrubmalik only. This being so, to
explain Jethaamar's place in the series, he would have to be an elder
brother of Jedail reigning between Karibail and him; this view presupposes
the abdication of the title of king by Jedail in favour of a son or younger
brother Jekrubmalik. Perhaps the true explanation may be simpler, but
any way we have four reigns during the life of the priest.

Dr. Glaser identifies Jethaamar Bajjan with Itamara, and counting in all
forty generations of kings of Saba, and Saba and Raidan, before the date
300 A.D., he makes the first Sabaean king begin to reign about 820 B.C.
According to the same system of calculation, the seventeen kings (in fifteen
generations) of Saba only, would reign to about 440 B.C., or to within a
couple of centuries of the date of Eratosthenes. Himyarite coins begin in
the 5th cent. B.C., and testify to a degree of intercourse with Europe, which
would have enabled European writers, who went to the right sources, to
obtain tolerably accurate information.

The imitation, which seems so unmotived, of Athenian owls in the
coinage of Southern Arabia, shows exactly how far the intercourse
extended.1 During the maritime supremacy of Athens (465-412 B.C.)
Athenian money reached Egypt in exchange for corn, and Gaza in exchange
for Arabian spices and general Oriental produce, and hence it came to be
known throughout Arabia. Oriental imitations have been found, probably
as early as Alexander, whose coinage is imitated in a tetradrachm, with a
Himyaritic inscription, of a King Abijatha.2 Silver coins with Himyaritic
characters have been found both at Mareb and Sana, but the native manu-
facture was mainly developed later.

In 167 B.C. Delos was made a free Roman port, under Athenian
administration, and after the humiliation of Rhodes, in the third Mace-
donian war, and the destruction of Corinth (146 B.C.), it became the
chief centre of Oriental trade. The Phoenician guild of merchants and
shipowners, under the protection of the Tyrian Herakles, has already been
mentioned ; and by this route Athenian tetradrachms again found their
way in quantities to Gaza. After 88 B.C., when 20,000 of the inhabitants
of Delos were massacred by the fleet of Mithradates, the supply of Athenian
coins must have fallen off, and the kings of Yemen had to make reproduc-
tions of them as best they could. It is particularly curious to note how, in
the ruder coins, little is left of the owl but its eyes, which sometimes seem
about to develop into two heads, the artist evidently having no idea of
what his original was intended to represent.

The Periplus (which Dr. Glaser believes to be later than 56 A.D.) says
of a Himyaritic King Charibael that he showed himself " a friend of Roman
emperors by continuous embassies and presents," and we cannot understand
the place of Arabia in the Old World until we realize that her princes were
connected " by embassies and presents " with the great powers of earlier
1 W. B. Head, Numismatic Chronicle, xviii. p. 273 ff. 2 Ib., xx. p. 303.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 509

ages also. South Arabia seems to have had no art of its own, but its
monuments show the sources from whence it might have borrowed. Out
of a very few specimens of graphic art, we find sphinxes of mixed Egyptian
and Assyrian type, like those of Cappadocia,1 and a lion and palm tree on
a reversed cone.

The matter of the inscriptions, apart from their historical interest, is
monotonous but characteristic. The King Karibail Watar, already
mentioned, appears in one of the longest of the miscellaneous inscriptions,
which is given in full by Glaser.2 It is a dedication of lands and temples,
originally received in grant from Karibail, and it conveys an impression
that titles to land, or indeed to any kind of property, must have been
extraordinarily complicated by the degree of joint family and tribal owner-
ship which appears to have prevailed. In general, the gods are entreated
to grant male children and protection for self and family, property or
buildings. Votive tablets commemorate escapes, e.g. " When the Sabaeans
and other warriors attacked the (Minaean) founder of the inscription in the
house of Ben Saoufan ; " and, as the modern Bedouin vow to kill a sheep
if they escape from an impending fray, their ancestors sacrificed sheep — as
many as forty on one occasion — to commemorate similar mercies. One
inscription prays that ground may bring forth forty-fold, another gives thanks
for a victory and the torture of able-bodied enemies ; and another for
several victories, enemies slain and rich booty.3 Some of them are set up
by women ; in one the founder mentions uhis heiress Kasabeh . . .
and the son qf the possessoress of the property,"4 and in some the de-
scendants give a female name in their genealogy. Prof. D. H. Miiller
notices in the Minaean inscriptions the frequent mention of the " daughters "
or women of Ma'in, and in one case " the women and the two elders " of
a tribe are mentioned as bestowing gifts; while "the Minasans and their
daughters " are named several times as bringing sacrifices in rich abundance
to the god Attar.5 The proposed translations of the Nakb el Hajar
inscription vary considerably. One makes a son and another a daughter
of the founder bear the title " Stadtholder of the Wadi," while others read
that the building was made by So-and-so, beyond the points to which the
sons of somebody else had built. It would, therefore, be premature to
build any conjectures upon merely possible renderings.

Commercial considerations had much to do with the internal politics of
South Arabia. Eratosthenes describes the four greatest peoples on the
exterior of Arabia Felix as the Minaeans on the Red Sea, whose chief town
is Kama ; their neighbours, the Sabaeans, with the capital Mariab (the
Sabsean kings are sometimes called kings of Marjab, i.e. Mareb, in the
inscriptions) ; the Kattabanians on the Arabian Gulf, whose royal seat is
called Tamna ; while towards the east are the Chatramotitae, with the city

1 At Amran, near Sana; for accompanying inscriptions see Osiander, Z,D.M.G.y xix.
pp. 160, 177.

2 Skizze, ii., p. 304.

3 Jos. Halevy, Etudes Sabeennes,Journ. Asiat., 1873, P- 4°4 ff-

4 Z.D.M.G., xix. 225. 5 m Z.f. d. K. d. M., vol. ii. (1888), p. 8.

510 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

Sabota (Hadramaut and Sabwat). "All these places are ruled by kings,
and are flourishing, adorned with fine temples and castles." Ma'in, the
real capital of the ancient Minaean kingdom, must have ceased to exist
before the time of Eratosthenes (276-196 B.C.); but the information of
foreign geographers, though apt, as we often have occasion to observe, to
lag a few centuries behind the facts of history, is not altogether untrust-
worthy on that account, as it is only conspicuous names and facts that
emerge from the natural filter of forgetfulness.

Dr. Glaser considers the Gebanites and Kattabani to be identical with
the Himyarites, in the south-west corner of Arabia, between Bab el Mandeb
and Taiz. Miiller thinks that Gabaan may have been a family rather than
a State, perhaps a family privileged to " collect " incense. According to
Pliny, collected incense was brought to Sabota (Sabwat, capital of Hadra-
maut), made to pass through Gebanite country (capital Thomna), whence
sixty-five camel stations lead to Gaza, through the kingdom of Saba ;l — the
route being selected to give each people in turn the profitable business of
providing escort and carriers for the caravans. The Kattabani were friends
of the Minsean, and hostile to the Sabaean kingdom, and Hadramaut was
more or less subject first to one and then to the other. Only nine princes,
priest kings or kings of Hadramaut, are named during the long period
between the Minsean period and the absorption of the province by Saba,
arc. 300 A D. But the country has been very imperfectly explored, and a
rich harvest may be expected, since Dr. Glaser has actually succeeded in
teaching the Arabs to take " squeezes " for him of inscriptions in districts
inaccessible to Europeans, and Mr. Bent also proposes to spend the winter
between Oman and Hadramaut.

Among the inscriptions recently copied by Mr. Beiit in Abyssinia, are
some of extreme brevity, and apparently unimportant in subject, which,
however, are of great interest, as the forms of certain characters and the
boustrophedon style of writing enable Prof. D. H. Miiller to identify them
as belonging to the earliest period of the Sabsean power, the age of the
Makarib or priest kings. These inscriptions were found at Yeha, the site
of an ancient temple and sacred grove, somewhat west of the later capital,
Aksum, in the heart of a country showing traces of ancient cultivation
exceeding anything that the traveller had ever seen in Greece or Asia
Minor,2 the terraces extending almost to the mountain tops.

The style of the principal buildings, and the indications of the worship
for which they were designed, agree closely with those of Southern Arabia ;
and the permanent character of the Sabaean colonies in Abyssinia is shown
by the massive irrigation works on the plateau of Kohaito towards the
coast, even more than by forts or temples. A city 7,000 feet above the
sea, which Mr. Bent plausibly identifies with the Koloe of the Erythraean
Periplus, is provided with water by a dam of masonry 73 yards in
length, converting a natural hollow into a lake, half a mile in circum-

1 Hist. Nat., xii. xxxii., § 5.

2 The Sacred City of the Ethiopians, p. 135. Cf. W. B. Harris : Journey through
Yemen, pp. 230-2.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 511

ference, and, of course, recalling the celebrated dyke of Mareb.1 These
works belong to the period when Yemen was only, as it were, the head-
quarters of an energetic trading race. It is the period when, according to
the Periplus,2 Arabia Felix received its name from the wealth and prosperity
of the city which received the goods exported from the east and west,
before other people had begun to sail straight from India to Egypt, and
from Egypt to distant places.

The contemporary Assyrian references to Arabian princes begin towards
the same time, i.e. after the decline of Ma'in, and in the earlier days of the
Sabasan monarchy. In 738 Zabibija, a queen of the Arabians, is mentioned
as sending tribute to Tiglath-Pileser III., and two or three years later, her
successor, Queen Samsi, who also pays tribute to Sargon, was defeated,
deprived of her camels, oxen, and spices, and pursued to her fastness, "in
a place of thirst," where her camp and her people were overthrown. The
other names mentioned in the account of these campaigns show that
Samsi must have reigned somewhere between Teima and Medina, " on the
borders of the lands of the west," which u no man knows, and which are in
a place that is far off." Senacherib also carried off an Arab princess from
the fortress Adumu (? Petra) to Nineveh, and Esarhaddon boasts of slaying
eight princes of the land of Bazu, the Biblical Buz, still in the north-west
of Arabia, two of whom are the queens of Diikhrani and Ikhilu. The
seventh campaign of Assurbanipal was directed against a newly made king
of Arabia, who, relying on an alliance with Natnu, king of the Nabatu,
" whose place is far off," broke his oaths of allegiance, was defeated, and
carried captive with his women.

Dr. Glaser is inclined to identify these Nabataeans with the Aramaean
Nabatu of Tiglath-Pileser, rather than the Nabiate of the earlier cuneiforms ;
but their migration must have been accomplished before the yth cent. B.C.
Whatever the exact date of their settlement, it may be doubted whether
any migration of this late date would materially alter or affect the character
of the population ; and all that we learn of the later Nabataeans harmonizes
with what we should expect to find true of the kingdoms of the south and
west.

§ 2. THE NABATVEANS.

Strabo counts the Nabataeans as well as the Sabaeans among the in-
habitants of Arabia Felix, and describes the marriage customs of the
country in the following terms : " A man's brothers are held in more
respect than his children. The kingship also and other offices of authority

1 L.c., p. 218. Another resemblance noted by Mr. Bent (pp. 180, 188) may, as he
says, "only be a coincidence to which no value need be attached." Yet it is certainly
strange to find the decoration of the monoliths at Aksum reproducing that on tombs in
the south-east of Asia Minor and Syria, and especially the stone imitation of timber work,
characteristic of Lycia and Cilicia. These traits are not characteristic of South Arabian
architecture, neither are they likely to have been introduced by late Greek influence.
Early intercourse between Arabia and the earliest so-called Ionic cities of Asia Minor is
presupposed in some legends mentioned below, for which the coincidence may, perhaps,
bespeak an additional shadow of consideration.

2 § 26. A German translation, with notes, was published by "B. Fabricius."

512 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

are filled by members of the stock in order of seniority. Property is com-
mon among all the relations. The eldest is the chief, and there is one wife
among them all." He adds, "Trades are not changed from one family to
another, but each workman continues to exercise that of his father; "* and
in another place describes the succession to the throne as not passing from
father to son, but to the first son born in a noble family after the king's
accession. He does not expressly mention the transmission of property
or the counting of descent in the female line, but we have better authority
than his somewhat confused reports, for a close approximation to Lycian
customs among the Nabatasans, in the funeral inscriptions recently trans-
lated by MM. Renan and Euting; and since there is less room for
misunderstanding as to the visible external fruits of the national organi-
zation, than as to the peculiarities of family law, we may accept the rest
of his account of the manners and customs of the people without
mistrust.

Strabo says of Petra, the capital of the Nabatseans, that it has excellent
laws for the administration of public affairs ; the king is of royal race, but
frequently renders an account to the people of his government, and inquiry
may be made by them into his mode of life ; a minister who is called
" brother," and is chosen from the " companions," is associated with him
(like the quasi-king or high priest of the Leuco-Syrians). Strabo's friend,
Athenodorus, who had visited Petra, said that the Romans and other
strangers settled in the city were frequently engaged in litigation with each
other and the natives, but that the latter " never had any dispute among
themselves, and lived together in perfect harmony." The geographer adds
other traits. The houses are sumptuous and of stone ; the cities without
walls, on account of the peace which prevails. The Nabataeans are
prudent, and fond of accumulating property. The community fine a
person who has diminished his substance, and confer honours on him who
has increased it ; they have few slaves, and either serve themselves and
each other or are waited on by their relations. They eat their meals in
companies of fixed number (like the men of Crete, Sparta, and CEnotria),
each attended by musicians, and (as in ancient China) the drinking of a
prescribed number of cupfuls was a feature in the ceremonious entertain-
ments given by the kings. Herodotus also observes, concerning the Arabs
generally, that they observe contracts with a fidelity unknown to other
nations.

The Nabatsean inscriptions recently obtained by Messrs. Doughty,
Euting, and Huber all belong to the first century, before and after Christ,
and the majority of them to the reign of "King Haritat2 who loves his
people" (B.C. 9-39 A.D.), a designation which accompanies the king's
name in all but the very first inscriptions of his reign. They make it
plain that property in tombs was considered of the utmost importance,
and was secured by written deeds of various kinds, the provisions of
which were enforced by appeals to the 'gods and the king to execute
1 Strabo, xvi. iv. 21, 24, 25. 2 cf. 2 Cor. xi. 32.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 513

judgment on all violations of the owners' rights. And they also show
that this very highly esteemed kind of family property was vested more
often than not in the women of the family, and that it was transmitted by
preference in the female line.

Out of twenty-six funeral inscriptions translated by Euting,1 six describe
the grave in question as built by So-and-so, son of Such-an-one (the
grandfather is also mentioned occasionally, but not always), for himself,
his children, and their descendants, and no one else, save such as may be
authorized by deed, under the owner's hand ; and the curses of the gods
are invoked against any one who sells, pledges, gives or lets or executes
any deed in contravention of the above restrictions for keeping the grave
inviolable and sacred. The imprecations are the same in all classes of
inscription, and in a few there is provision also for the payment of a fine
to the king.

Three inscriptions are exactly parallel to the above mentioned six, save
that the grave is described as belonging to a woman — daughter of such a
father or such a mother — who has built it for herself, her children, and
their descendants. Seven graves bear the names of men, but reserve a
place for mother, wife, or sister, in addition to their own children ; while in
one a similar reservation is made on behalf of a brother, apparently an
absent merchant, probably married abroad, whose children would naturally
be buried among their mother's people. Three belong to women and are
destined to daughters and daughters' children, or to sons and daughters
and the children of the latter. Five belong to men, for their children, to
whom wife, mother, or sisters are sometimes added, but with a similar
reservation to the daughters' children. One of the most interesting is
made by a man for himself and for his daughter, and her sons and
daughters, and the children of her daughters. She and her sons are
expressly forbidden to sell, let or assign it, but it is to remain for an ever-
lasting possession to the descendants thus indicated in the female line,
perhaps the most ancient example of so complete an entail. In one case,
the man who owns the tomb assigns it absolutely to his wife to do as she
pleases with ; and in one we are told that it is built by a husband and wife
for two brothers of the latter, and it is explained that one-third belongs to
the husband and two-thirds to the wife.

In other words, twenty out of the twenty-six inscriptions give a more or
less marked preponderance to the proprietary rights of women. Natural
relationships are not ignored, and husband and wife, mother and son, father
and daughter expect to share the same grave ; but so far as the tomb is an
heirloom, intended to pass to future generations, it is a daughter's grand-
daughters who are considered to maintain the continuity of the family
line.

1 Nabattiische Inschriflen aus Arabien, Berlin, 1885.

L L

5i4 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

§ 3. BAHREIN, SOKOTRA, AND THE SEA TRADE.

After Strabo's account of the Nabataeans, the most suggestive contribu-
tion to the history of Arabia from without is that of Diodorus, which in
times past has been made the subject of much controversy and scepticism.
According to him there lie over against the utmost point of Arabia Felix
many islands, " Holy Island " producing frankincense, where it is unlawful
to bury, and two others, one seven furlongs off where they bury, and one
running so far to the east that India itself may be seen like a cloud from
it.1 The chief of these islands is called Panchaea, the natives of which
sell their produce to Arabian merchants ; people from the west and
Indians, Cretans and Scythians also dwell there. The chief city is called
Panara, sacred to Jupiter Triphylius, and is governed by a democracy
without any monarch. The magistrates are elected annually, and weighty
matters are referred to the college of priests : the temple is sixty furlongs
from the city.

Details respecting the splendour and fertility of the country are given
after Euhemerus, which has increased the disposition to regard them with
suspicion. The nation is divided into three parts : the priests and arti-
ficers ; the husbandmen ; and the militia and shepherds. The priests
govern all, and have power and authority in all public transactions. The
husbandmen and herdsmen bring everything into a public stock, there
being nothing appropriated save a house and garden to each. All the
revenues are received by the priests, and they "justly distribute to every
one as their necessity requires." The soldiers defend the country. There
are mines of precious metals which it is forbidden to work for export.
They dress luxuriously in fine wool, with white linen for the priests and
golden ornaments. There are words like Cretan in the language, and the
people entertain Cretans hospitably from a tradition of ancient kinship.

It is impossible not to be reminded by all this of the sacred cities of the
Leuco-Syrians ; of the communism of the Spanish Iberians, and the class
divisions of those of the Caucasus, as described by Strabo ; of the Carian
temple of Labranda, with its sacred way, and of the Carian Jupiter, common
to the Carians, Lydians, and Mysians ; and of the Egyptian and Baby-
lonian habit of regarding the priesthood as the depository of civic justice.
And, whatever the intrinsic value of the authority quoted for these state-
ments, they are certainly not suggested by any leaning in favour of the
particular ethnological classification which they seem to support.

The description of the temple and the sacred fountain deserves to be
quoted at length for another reason. Near the temple, we are told, such
a mighty spring of fresh water rushes out of the ground that it becomes
a navigable river, irrigating all the country near. An even space, 4 fur-
longs in length and 100 yards wide, surrounds the temple, of 200 yards
in length, of white marble with huge statues of the gods; at the end
of which the river from the above-named fountain breaks forth, and a

1 Diod., v. xlii.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 515

most sweet and clear water flows from it, called " the water of the Sun,"
conducing much to health. The whole fountain is lined on both sides
and flagged at the bottom with stones. It is unlawful for any but the
priests to approach the brink. All the land for 200 furlongs round is con-
secrated to the gods, and the revenue bestowed in maintaining the public
sacrifices and the service of the gods. Beyond this is a high mountain,
whence, according to tradition, Uranus used to contemplate the heavens.
It is added that the inhabitants were composed of three several nations,
and that there were three principal cities in the island.

It is not always easy to follow the descriptions of Greek geographers,
even when dealing with localities frequented by traders of their own race,
and confusion was inevitable with regard to the distant coasts of Arabia, for
which they depended on reports passing from hand to hand, and varied at
each step according to the points on which each inquirer was interested to
gain information. We may therefore esteem ourselves fortunate whenever
any natural phenomenon, of identifiable singularity, is described, to which
a counterpart is discovered by modern travellers ; and a plausible identifi-
cation is not necessarily to be rejected because the ancient description
associates features belonging to quite distinct districts.

The island of Bahrein was carefully explored by Captain Durand, and
his description edited and annotated by Sir Henry Rawlinson,1 and it is
scarcely conceivable that any island off the coast of Arabia should come
nearer to answering, in the matter of its fountain, to the description of
Diodorus than this. The island lies in a land-locked bay, which has
already been mentioned more than once, as a point of considerable
importance in the trade of Babylonia and Arabia. It is thirty or forty
miles from the mainland, and resembles Tyre in the springs of fresh water
that rise through the brine.2 There are four springs in the island : the
Adari " supplies many miles of date groves through a canal of ancient
workmanship, the stone of which in some places is falling in, but which
still forms a perfect river of fast-running water, about ten feet broad
by two in depth. The spring itself is from thirty to thirty-five feet deep,
and rises so strongly that a diver is forced upwards on nearing the bottom.
The water, where it rises from the deep spring, whose basin, artificially
banked, is about twenty-two yards broad by forty long, is as clear as
crystal, with a slightly green tint. . . . It is not perfectly sweet . . .
the best drinking water being brought on camels from wells, said to be
twenty fathoms deep, in the hills of Rifaa. The water is conducted from
these various wells by ordinary unbanked channels, the larger of which
have now come to look like natural streams." The Arabs suppose the

1 Journal R.A.S., April, 1880, p. 189.

2 Cf. Palgrave's description of the spring of fresh water which gushes up in the sea
about sixty yards from shore at low water off Moharrak. He watched the girls of the
town " wade out with their pitchers on their heads till they reached a little rock, the
landmark of the spring, which pours up from below with force enough to drive back the
brackish waves on every side, leaving a large circle of potable water within which the
naiads plunged their crockery." (Narrative, ii. p. 229.)

516 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

water, for which Bahrein is famous, to come from an underground branch
of the Euphrates.

The passage from Eratosthenes, quoted by Strabo, which deals with this
side of the Persian Gulf, makes Gerrha, on the Gulf of Bahrein, whence
Arabian merchandize and aromatics were carried by land, belong to
" Chaldean exiles from Babylon ; " while further on, there are islands,
" Tyre and Aradus, which have temples resembling those of the Phoeni-
cians," whose cities are claimed by the islanders as their own colonies :
and still earlier geographers mention an island Ogyris in the open sea.
Pliny mentions an island Tylos, in the same quarter, famous for its wealth
in pearls, and with a city of the same name, which is no doubt meant also
for Tyros. The name Ogyris is interesting on account of a cuneiform
inscription found on the island of Bahrein, which Sir Henry Rawlinson
reads as hieratic Babylonian : " The palace of Rimugas, the servant of
Inzak, of the tribe of Ogyr."

Of course these passages are relied upon by those who accept the iden-
tification of the Phoenicians with the men of Punt, and the traditional
derivation of both from the Persian Gulf. And Mr. Bent's examination l
of two of the innumerable tomb-mounds on the largest island seemed to
him to supply further confirmation of this view, as the tombs contained
fragments of ivory and pottery, resembling the Phoenician remains found
at Cameirus and lalysus. Thousands of large mounds containing tombs
stretch for miles along the south-west side of the island, and testify to its
former importance as a Necropolis ; but until the mounds have been
systematically examined, it is perhaps premature to take them as doing
more than give a general presumption in favour of the existence of a real
foundation for the kind of relationship reported by the Greeks. The more
importance we are led to attach to the earliest kingdoms of the Arabian
coast, the less necessary it is to see Phoenicians, in the modern sense, in
every trading community engaged in dealings with the Eastern seas. And,
at the same time, the more nearly such writers as Strabo and Diodorus
come to being well informed as to the character of the Oriental element in
the population of these settlements, the more confidence may we feel in the
other reports concerning Greek colonies preserved by the same authorities.

Pliny attributes to the Milesians a colony on the west of Arabia, which
Dr. Glaser proposes to locate on the Asir coast, between Yemen and the
Hejaz ; and Diodorus says of the Deba, for whom a similar locality is
proposed : " They receive strangers hospitably, if they come from Boeotia
or Peloponnessus, because, according to a fabulous ancient tradition, the
people have some distant relationship, from the time of Herakles, with
them." To which should perhaps be added the remarks of the Periplus
on the inhabitants of the island Dioscurides (Sokotra) : They are few in
number and dwell on the north side of the island facing the mainland ;
they are immigrants of mixed race, Arabs, Indians, and even some Greeks,
come for the sake of traffic.

1 Atken&um, July 6th, 1889.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 517

The island of Sokotra was undoubtedly a point of considerable
importance in the earliest trade between the coasts of Asia and Africa ;
and, while the island of Bahrein contributed some features to the descrip-
tion of the Holy Island, the name Panchaea itself is Egyptian, and, so far
as it designated any earthly spot, probably referred to Sokotra. The steps
of this interesting identification, to which several scholars have contributed,
have been traced by Professor Hommel.1

The Thirteenth Dynasty story, of an Egyptian, shipwrecked on an
island, the native land of myrrh and incense, whose king is a benevolent
snake, speaks of the magic spot as aa pen-en-ka, the Island of Spirits, or
Pa-anch, the" Island of Life, no doubt with some more or less mythological
reference. Both the name Panchaea in Diodorus and the story in Strabo
of an island Ophiodes in the Arabian Gulf, famous both for serpents and
for topazes, are probably connected with the local traditions derived from
the ancient Egyptian tale, or the still earlier mythological conceptions of
which it preserves the echo.

There is an apparent dearth of ancient monuments in Sokotra itself,
which is perplexing if it was ever an important settlement ; it was certainly
not used as a common burying place, and it may have been frequented by
traders, who, having their homes and graves elsewhere, found its sanctity
protection enough to let them dispense with other permanent buildings.
Dr. Schweinfurth was struck by the presence in the modern language of
foreign elements for which no Semitic root could be suggested ; 2 and
he observes that the physical type of the natives is much more European
than that of the people of any neighbouring countries, whether regarded as
Hamites or Semites. But from a want of interpreters he was unable
to make much advance towards a knowledge of their habits, beyond the
obvious fact that " they always have a stick in their right hand." The
only wild pomegranate known is found in Sokotra, a fact which also
seems incompatible with any long-continued occupation of the island by a
considerable settled population.3

Besides the above-named Milesian colonies, Pliny speaks of a Greek
Arethusa, Larissa, and Chalcis, which were destroyed in consequence of
divers wars : we may ask ourselves whether this Larissa too is a legacy of
Pelasgian or Alarodian enterprise, but only inscriptions, like — or not like —
that of Lemnos can answer the question. So we may speculate whether
the Milesian Ampelones was colonized by a Carian or an Ionian Miletus ;
but the point cannot be determined in a way that will elucidate other
doubtful questions in the history of the city, unless fresh material evidence
is unearthed, in the literal sense. Carian graves should be as recognisable
now as in the days of Thucydides, and the desolation which for ages has
enveloped the neighbourhood of the ancient land of the gods is the most
potent agency for the preservation of ancient monuments.

1 Inschriftliche Glossen und Excurse zum Genesis, etc. Neue Kirchliche Zeitschrift>
1891, p. 897 ff.

2 Glaser, Skizze, vol. ii. p. 184.

3 Westermann's lllustrirte Deutsche Monatsheft. Ap. 1891, p. 38 ff.

5i8 FROM MASS ALIA TO MALABAR,

It is true that the first result of new archaeological discoveries is some-
times to raise new problems instead of solving old ones ; but it also
sometimes happens that one fact has power to confirm or confute more
than one set of guesses. And so, every authentic antiquity discovered
between the Bahr el Benat and Mashona land may help to determine how
much trading enterprise in the eastern seas was Punite, and how much
Phoenician ; and also how much of the colonizing adventure in the western
sea was Phoenician, and how much due to any other pre-Hellenic element,
combining devotion to trade and to a god, whose images are like a
barbarian Herakles.

The Zimbabwe ruins in Mashona land, described by Mr. Bent, are, in
several respects, very like the handiwork of Phoenicians, but in commercial
dynamics there is always something to be said for the hypothesis which
tracks trade along a line of least resistance. And it would certainly be an
economy of enterprise if we can suppose Sofala, the port for the Zimbabwe
gold mines, to have been reached by the gradual, natural expansion of a
trade along the east of Africa which began with Sokotra and the Somali
coast, and went on, as trade that has ceased to improve its markets will,
till it reached again something too good to be left. Like most Phoenician
settlements, the Mashona land ruins consist of a fortified post, with a
temple, the citadel in this case, however, serving to protect a mining
settlement rather than a seaport.

The chief ruin is elliptical, 280 feet in length, with walls from 15 to 35
feet high, and from 16 to 5 feet thick. The floor is concrete ; the wall of
mortarless stone, in places very even and regular, especially on the south-
east face, where also there are rows of decorative herringbone. The
fortress is built like a sort of maze, — a long narrow passage between high
outer and inner walls. One gateway faces true north. The absence of
mortar has prevented the destruction of the walls by vegetation, and
the evenness of the face suggests that the work was done by men
accustomed to bricks : the stones are of irregular thickness, which gives
strength to the fabric. There are two round towers, like the nuraghs of
Sardinia, truncated cones, of unhewn stone laid without mortar ; but the
nearest parallel in proportion and position to the supposed temple
enclosure is found in a coin of Byblos,1 which shows a cone facing the
temple, and evidently the chief object of worship.

Slighter ruins are scattered around, but no tombs. The hill fortress is
crenellated, as it were, with alternate round towers and monoliths, the
latter facing the sun at the winter solstice. A narrow slit in the granite of
the hill is used for a staircase. Huge walls and zigzag passages of uncon-
jecturable purpose remain. There are pillars with carved birds of the
vulture type, and ancient objects of various kinds were found on the north
side of the ruins, where the Kaffirs do not dig because of the cold. The
limits of the decoration and the position of the towers seem determined
by the sun's position, or rather by the incidence of the sun's rays at the

1 Figured Hist, of Art, iii. 60. The Ruined Cities of Mashona Land. J. T. Bent, p. 127.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 519

summer solstice. The decoration extends along the part of the wall
which receives directly the rays of the sun when rising at the summer
solstice : a hill intercepts the sun's rays, but the great tower would catch
the sun and a monolith on the wall cast a shadow at this point.

The diameter of the great tower is 17*17 feet (or 10 cubits of 20*62
in.), which is also the circumference of the small tower ; and the radius of
the curve of the next outer wall is the 10 cubit diameter multiplied by the
square of the ratio of the circumference to diameter ; and the same
fractions and multiples recur all through the building. Another tower
marks the position of the sun at the summer solstice. Three of the
doorways correspond to the direction of the sun's rising and setting at the
summer solstice. The arrangements made for noting the meridian transit
of stars would probably date the building sufficiently, for an astronomer
going far enough back, and calculating the position of stars known to the
ancestors of the builders, who were probably akin to those who built at
Mareb and elsewhere in Yemen. Arabian writers of the 9th and loth
cent. A,D. frequently allude to the gold of Sofala, so that the opening of
the mines cannot be thrown further back than for the period during which
the gold workings could remain profitable.1

The extent and antiquity of trade between Arabia and India before the
days of Alexander is another question we may be content to pass by, with
the observation that, in mere distance, it is as far from the head of the
Persian Gulf to Cape Ras el Had, the eastern extremity of Oman, as from
thence to Bombay or Sokotra, or from Bombay to the Malabar coast,
where the sexagesimal system of notation and other archaic customs meet
us among a Dravidian people, who must have learnt or imported them,
before the Babylonian notation was abandoned, from regions in touch with
those where it had prevailed.

One other curious fact may perhaps have some bearing on the course of
ocean exploration in these prehistoric days. Sailors, like merchants, travel
along the lines of least resistance, and man is not the only animal of
whom the same may be said. Phoenician navigators were said to direct
their course sometimes by the flight of birds,2 and it is a fact that even
those birds which accomplish the longest flights and can cross the widest
oceans, always select, by what looks like marvellous instinct, the shortest
ocean routes. It is only the birds — or the ships — ^that take the right
course who reach land on the other side \ but a flight of birds, who know
their way, is an invaluable guide to a sailor who has lost his.

There is a kind of falcon which breeds in S. Siberia, Mongolia, and
Northern China, that winters in India, and, strange to say, in East Africa.3
When or why the bird began this practice, not even a geologist can say ;
but it is enabled to keep it up by the existence of possible stations in the

1 Cf. Transactions of Ninth International Congress of Orientalists, ii. p. 416, for
arguments in favour of a date before the Christian era.

2 Or, perhaps, like the Cinghalese and other navigators in unknown waters, they took
birds with them, to let fly when in doubt as to the direction of land.

3 Migration of Birds. Charles Dixon, p. 100, 1892.

520 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

Indian Ocean, which, it is plausibly supposed, may represent larger lands
submerged in comparatively recent geologic time. Guided by birds, and
profiting by their knowledge of the scattered landing-places, it would be
possible for a ship belated off the coast of Malabar to make its way from
the Laccadive Islands, which must have been touched deliberately, to the
Maldives, and then either by the Seychelles and Amirante Islands, or the
Chagos Archipelago to Madagascar, or the Mozambique Channel. And it
is within the limits of possibility that an adventurous chance of this kind,
rather than persistent exploration of the African coast line, may have
brought the builders of the Zimbabwe ruins past the mouth of the Zambesi
to Sofala.

Wellsted was told of a boat that ran ashore at Sokotra, thinking herself
on the African main ; and of course the longer the voyages undertaken,
the greater the chance of serious miscalculations in their course, leading to
distant discoveries. In the i2th cent, vessels from Sohar sailed as far as
China, and it is probably no less true of the eastern than of the western
seas, that mediaeval navigation fell far behind that of the early Phoenician
traders in skill and enterprise.1

Bahrein and the ports of Oman have retained more of their primitive
cosmopolitanism than Yemen ; and Palgrave observed at Mascat that the
men of Bahrein, there very numerous, stood alone in seeming "to possess
the hybrid privilege of mixing with all, while their easy-going, unnational,
indistinctive character gives them facility of access " 2 where Jews, Persians,
Indians, and Nejdean bigots would fail to find entrance. He calls them
'• the Maltese of the east/' but more amiable, cooler, and more honest.
In connection with this appreciation the dictum of the Arab chronologist
Ayoob ibn Kirreeyah {circ. 700 A.D.) is interesting; when asked, "What are
the inhabitants of Bahrein?" he replied, " Nabathseans turned Arabs;"
while the further question; "What are the inhabitants of Oman? "pro-
duced the response: "Arabs turned Nabathseans." Palgrave considers this
Arab use of the term Nabathsean "less national than conventional" — a
general denomination for " the various populations inhabiting the regions
of the Tigris and the Euphrates ; " 3 but the distinction between the men
of Oman and Bahrein takes account of the two elements of tradition and
observation. And it is possible that the Arabs had certain definite
associations with the name, such as prompted the forgery of the
" Nabathsean Book of Agriculture," and used it to denote settled and
pacific communities, " where they of Ham had dwelt from of old."

1 Movers, vol. ii. pt. iii. p. 191.

2 Narrative of a Year'' s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, vol. ii. p. 366.

3 2b.t p. 158.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 521

§ 4. TRACES OF PRE-!SLAMITIC CUSTOM AND ETHICS IN MODERN

ARABIA.

Marriage and Kinship and the Matriarchate in Ancient Arabia have
been made the subject of separate treatises,1 so that it is the less necessary
to dwell on the fact that purely Arab custom has some affinities with the
system of domestic relationship specially associated with the earliest civilized
race. All technical Arabic words for stock or race, tribe, sub-tribe or
the bonds of kinship, like the Chinese sing, involve literally descent from
the same mother. A good many traditional names of Arabic tribes are
female or plural in form, and the actual tribe is held together by the bond
of a common life rather than a common descent. The most precious
pedigrees of the Arabs are those — not, as we should say, of their horses,
but — of their mares : pure blood is always reckoned through the dam, so
much so that the phrase, " son of a horse," is used contemptuously to
describe an animal that is not thorough-bred.

In mediaeval Arab romance the hero is described as one who has " a
valiant maternal uncle ;" and Lane adds a note to this expression, " for the
sake of mentioning that the Arabs generally consider innate virtues as
inherited through the mother." Hence the proverb : " They asked the
mule who was his father; he said the horse is my ch&l" (or maternal
uncle). " God reward (or curse) his chal" is a common phrase, and the
word may stand for any member of the mother's family group. At the
present day, pure descent on both sides is necessary to enable any one to
call himself asil or noble. And in Yemen, centuries after Mahomet,
noble ladies might show themselves unveiled, as an assertion of their
rank, or an insult to an assailant, who is of no more account in their eyes
than a slave.

As there is no law of descent strict enough to prevent a struggle for
power between the most powerful and popular members of the family of
a great chief, it is not likely that the queens of Saba and other ancient
Arab principalities reigned in virtue of any strict hereditary claim, like
that of the Egyptians. But custom and tradition were in favour of obeying
noble women with masterful minds, who were de facto possessed of the
royal "authority. Burton observes: " In the early days of El Islam,, if
history be credible, Arabia had a race of heroines;" and the independence
and influence of women is still greatest in the most remote and secluded
parts of the peninsula. The story of the Lady Asma and Queen Sayyidah,
which is told in Omarah's History of Yemen, may be given partly as a
specimen of a class and partly as a pendant to that of Pythodoris and a
parallel to a curious Chinese situation, which has a certain tendency to
reproduce itself; namely, the establishment of a quasi-dynastic succession
by queen mothers and consorts.

Asma was a beautiful and learned lady, whose family asked for her a

1 Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. By Prof. W. Robertson Smith, 1885.
Das Matriarchat bet den alter Arabern. G. A. Wilken.

522 FROM MASS ALIA TO MALABAR.

dowry which only kings could pay, intending her to wed with one of the
kings of San'a, or some other royal house. She does marry As-Sulayhi, who
raises his standard A.H. 429, and makes himself king of Yemen. She
caps Koran verses with her husband, and is celebrated by poets, who sing,
" She of the white hands has bestowed gifts." Her husband was slain,
and she herself made prisoner on an expedition to Mecca in 473 (1080
A.D.). She is rescued after a year by her son Al-Mukarram, who suc-
ceeded to the throne, though his mother still had much to do with the
expenditure. Al-Mukarram's wife, the Lady Sayyidah, had been brought
up by Asma, and after her death he made over the superintendence of
affairs to his wife. She defeated by stratagem and slew the " squint-eyed
slave," who had dared to lay hands on her mother-in-law, and on
Al-Mukarram's death was sought in marriage by his successor in the office
of Da'y.

She refuses his suit, and an autograph letter from the Imam and the
entreaties of her chief ministers are required to induce her to give an
apparent consent. A woman was not eligible as da'y, but the sovereign
was the political superior of such an officer, and Professor Robertson
Smith1 points out that Sayyidah is addressed, in another letter, by the
Imam as his Hojjah or representative in the land of Yemen, one of the
four great dioceses of the Fatimite propaganda, so that she was perhaps,
in a sense, the ecclesiastical superior of her suitor as well. This da'y
Saba was also remarkable for having but one wife, apart from this political
alliance, to whom he was faithful, as Aly As-Sulayhi was to Asma. Their
son was married to Fatimah, daughter of Sayyidah and Al-Mukarram, who
returned to her mother when he took a second wife.

Saba survived the queen one year, so the feminine dynasty was not a
long one ; but the character of all these Arab royalties is well illustrated
by a story of her government. The Khaulanites and the Banu Zarr revolt
against her authority, or at least seize fortresses, while making outward
professions of loyalty, The queen sends a letter of a few words, in her
own handwriting, to one Amru, of the tribe of Janb, bidding him come
with horse and foot and occupy the lands of the sons of Zarr ; it was so
done, and the rebellious Imram compelled to send and beg for mercy.
The queen sent him 10,000 dinars to feed his troops, but the money is
returned : " Does she not know what it is that can be of service to me? "
Then with her own hand she wrote again to Amru : " On receiving this
our command, depart from the country of the Banu Zarr, with our thanks
for your services. " Before an hour had elapsed, not one of his people
remained in the place. "This, by the Lord, said Imram to his brother, is
truly (a receiving of) honour and obedience ! "2 But the limits to a power
supported by this kind of physical force are sufficiently obvious.

These royal or noble ladies, it will have been observed, claimed the
right, or at least exercised the power of divorcing themselves from

1 Journal R. A. S., 1893, P- 2O3-

2 Omarah's History of Yaman, tr. by H. C. Kay, 1892, p. 56.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 523

any husband who took a second wife; and the authorities quoted by
Chwolsohn x are sufficient to show that they were in this only upholding
what had formerly been a general national custom. En Nedin (writing
about 917 A.D.) says of the Sabaeans that they marry before witnesses, not
with relations, that the laws for men and women are the same, that divorce
is only allowed for infidelity (or grave offences), and that only one wife is
allowed at a time. Scharistani, born nearly a century later (1075 A.D.)
and thus a contemporary of Sayyidah, repeats in almost identical terms,
that marriages are performed in the presence of the father-in-law and
witnesses, that divorce is permitted on the decision of an arbitrator or
judge, and that men do not take two wives at a time.

In Arabia a woman did not change her kin on marriage,2 and women of
distinction therefore preferred to marry within their own tribe, unless the
husband was willing to leave his own kinsmen to join his wife's. The city
of Zabid, in Yemen, of which a brother of the Lady Asma was made
governor, was famous for the seductions of its women, which caused it to
be said that a man should put his camel to the trot if he would pass
through unscathed. And Ibn Batuta describes these same women as
willing to marry strangers who come to live with them, but they would
not go away with their husbands ; any child of such a marriage they kept
and provided tor themselves. The proverb, "It is a bad mother who
transplants her son," probably expresses the same feeling against a woman
marrying a stranger and going to live with the strange stock, though there
was no objection to her marrying the stranger who was received into the
tribe. Burton says, ''The wild men do not refuse their daughters to a
stranger, but the son-in-law would be forced to settle among them."3 And
on the opposite African coast, at the south of the Red Sea, there are
communities in which a man joins his wife's tribe.

An old Arabic phrase for the consummation of marriage is " He built
(a tent) over her," and besides all these indications of the position of the
wife and mother as "lady of the house," women also had anciently the
right of divorce and of contracting temporary marriages. A legend is told
of one lady, living amongst her sons, who had had forty husbands, from
twenty different tribes ; and in the time of Mahomet, a kind of marriage
contracted deliberately for a limited term or during pleasure, was common.
Even as lately as the seventeenth century, strangers or merchants staying
in " Sounan, the principal city of Arabia Felix," 4 had no difficulty in
arranging marriages for money. These temporary or mota marriages carried
no right of inheritance ; on the other hand, membership of a tribe conveyed
certain proprietary rights, and these were inherited from their mother
by sons who were brought up in her tribe rather than their father's.

By Mahomedan law, when there are no heirs, the reversion falls to the

1 Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus, vol. ii. pp. 10, 446.

" Kinship and Marriage in Ancient Arabia. Prol. Robertson Smith, p. 101.

3 R. F. .Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Mecca, vol. iii.
p. 40.

4 Hamilton's New Accozmt of the East Indies, vol. i. p. 52.

524 PROM MASSAL1A TO MALABAR.

asaba, i.e. " those who go to battle together : " l the law of inheritance
follows that of the spoils of war, and none can be heirs who do not " take
part in battle, drive booty, and protect property." This provision recalls
a curious distinction in the law of inheritance among the Towareks.
Heritable goods are there divided into " legitimate " and " illegitimate "
ones, of which the former consist of movables acquired by personal
industry, and are equally divided among the children of both sexes, while
the latter, " the goods of injustice " — that is to say, the spoils of war,
acquired by the collective force of the clan or family — are inherited by the
lawful sister's son, the only near male relative who is absolutely certain
(where female descent prevails) to be of the same stock as those who won
the spoils.2

A formula of divorce quoted by Prof. Robertson Smith seems almost
to show that the fruits of peace had at one time been considered by the
Arabs as belonging normally to women : " Begone," says the husband,
" for I will no longer drive thy flocks to the pasture." In general, before
Mahomet, the only restrictions on marriage were those between relations
on the mother's side — a fact which by itself is nearly conclusive as to the
current theory of relationship. Abulfeda also mentions as an old custom,
prevailing in some princely houses, that of regarding a man's brothers, and
ultimately his sisters' sons, as his heirs, instead of his own children — a
custom which is only one step removed from the sisters' sons' inheritance
of Malabar.

Just as ancient Babylonian law may be illustrated hereafter by the con-
sideration of Jewish law, custom, and mediaeval tradition, so, no doubt,
traces of the ancient laws of Arabia will be discovered scattered through
the mass of post-Mahomedan literature. An epigram quoted by Omarah
(pb. circ. 1173 A.D.) takes the form of a question: "Who will buy the
Akkites at the cost of a copper ? Behold, I will sell them all, absolutely
and without the option of cancelling the bargain ! " 3 Obviously then
there might be contracts in the form of a sale, which did not exclude the
option of cancelling the bargain, and it is probable that Arabists, who look
out for them, may find preciser traces of either the two stages in the
Egyptian sale of real property, or of the Babylonian and Malayali mortgage
or partial sale, which is not final because it conveys a part only of the
owner's interest.

Associations of the same kind are raised by the story of Cais ibn Al-
Khatum, who, when he went forth to avenge his father's death, provided
for his mother by handing over to one of his kinsmen a palm garden near
Medina, which was to be his if Cais fell in his enterprise, subject to the
condition that he would " nourish the old woman from it all her life." 4
Prof. Robertson Smith sees in this an indication of the incapacity of
women not only to inherit but to hold property, at least lands. But if

1 Robertson Smith, loc. cit., p. 54.

2 L' Evolution de la Propriety Ch. Letourneau (1889), p. 242.
8 Hist, of YamaHy p. 20. 4 R. Smith, I.e., p. 96.

ANCIENT ARABIA.

525

compared with Babylonian deeds, which provide for fathers in the same
way, by annuity in consideration of the use of land, it may betoken a state
of things parallel rather to the Hamitic system of pensions alimejitaires,
and antichretic mortgages.1

In some respects the mental attitude of the Arab towards Earth and
Water has remained primitive. Land regarded as space is common
property. It belongs to the tribe that, dwells within, or wanders over its
area. The law of Islam, endorsing earlier custom, allows a title to private
property in land to be acquired by cultivation. Opinions differ as to
whether the license of Caliph or Sultan is required, but the general
opinion is that whoever makes a fallow fruitful, whoever occupies and
vivifies or quickens uncultivated land, thereby becomes its owner. Some
say that the uncultivated land must be ownerless, and so far from other
dwellings that the human voice cannot be heard from one to the other.
The Kabyles regard uncultivated land as the property of the village, but
in some cases they hold that, even when the consent of the village council
has not been given to the reclamation, the person carrying it out has a
right to have his title recognised, while others say it is established if he has
occupied without opposition for three years.

In Arabia, of course, the essential step towards quickening the lifeless
soil is to dig a well or find a spring. The natural religion of Arabia, like
that of Syria, centres round the grove which overshadows the sacred
fountain. The god and the freeholder of a city, the lord of a country, the
husband of a wife, the master of a house or herds, are all designated by
the same word — Baal (Arab. Ba'l). Jewish and Mahomedan law agree
in distinguishing the taxation to be derived from land that is naturally and
that which is artificially irrigated. The former is called in the Talmud
the "field of the house of Baal," and in Arab documents, "what the
Ba'l waters." It was recently pointed out by Prof. Robertson Smith 2
that " Baal's land, in the sense in which it is opposed to irrigated fields,"
does not mean — as might be assumed in other climates — land watered by
the rains of heaven, and that " in fact, the best Arab authorities expressly
say, that the Ba'l is not fertilised by rain, but by subterranean waters.""

Arab theocracy goes back to the very beginnings of life in Arabia, and is
untinged by convention or tradition. " What the husbandman irrigates is
his own property, but what is naturally watered he regards as irrigated by
a god, and as the field, house, or property of this god, who is thus looked
upon as the Baal or owner of the spot." 3 Sacred tracts in Arabia, where
it was unlawful for any one but the ministers of the sanctuary to kill game
or utilize the vegetable products of the soil, served as sanctuaries and
neutral territory, where private feuds were suspended among the common
worshippers of the god. But in Arabia, even more than in the wealthy
priestdoms of Asia Minor, the administrators of sacred property seem to

1 Cf. ante, p. 375.

2 The Religion of the Semites (1889), pp. 92, 96.
8 H>., P- 95-

526 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

have regarded it as virtually held in trust for the nation or the tribe ; and
traditions of virtual communism were still in force even after Mahomet.
The prophet himself is said to have proposed to pay the debts of all
believers ; and it was still taken for granted in the time of Omar that the
revenues of the State were the common property of all Muslim.

Naturally irrigated land, by Arabic law, pays double tithes ; but the god
and the cultivator are the real proprietors, not, as in centralized monarchies,
the State. Reclaimed land pays only tithe, not land tax ; and thus, at
Bereydah, in the centre of North Arabia, Palgrave observed "the soil
belongs in full right to its cultivators, not to the Government, as in
Turkey."1 The discoverer of a well or spring has a right to from 50 to
500 cubits of surrounding soil ; and wells dug by private persons for their
own use are theirs as long as they use and occupy them, but become
public property if abandoned. Water rights are naturally among the
principal articles of property regulated.2 Any one might make a canal to
water fields from large natural rivers, and also from small ones, if it could
be shown that no injury to previous occupiers would be caused. In the
case of smaller watercourses the rule was to dam up the water and let it
come successively on the fields, beginning with those highest up. Artificial
canals were the collective property of those whose land they water, who
keep them up, or who made them. Strangers may be excluded from the
use of such water, but the joint-owners cannot store for themselves without
permission. Masonry canals follow the same law.

At Nakhl, near Burka, Wellsted found that 400 dollars was paid for an
hour's water once a fortnight, the time being measured by the rising and
setting of certain stars. The oases of Oman vary in size from one to seven
or eight miles in circumference, and stretch in a line towards the W.N.W.
from the Beni Abu All. With constant irrigation, one crop of wheat
and two of durrah are obtained. Wheat sown in October is reaped in
March,3 and at the same time of year date palms shed their leaves, the
mango, plaintain, and fig had renewed theirs and the vine was still bare ;
every season is represented at the same time in the growth of some plant —
a singularity which helps to measure the remarkable range and variety of
the produce. The Arabs believe the almond to be a native of Oman, and
all the varied fruits and grains of temperate Western Asia seem to thrive
with the same luxuriance as the date.

The discovery of underground springs is a mystery followed by a
peculiar class. Wellsted4 saw several sunk for to the depth of forty feet ;
an underground channel was then dug with a slight slope in the desired
direction, with chimneys at intervals to give light and air for those clean-
ing the channels ; these are usually about four feet broad and three deep,
containing a clear, rapid stream by which water is carried in abundance

1 Narrative, i. p. 315.

2 A. v. Kremer, Cullurgeschichte des Orients unter den Khali/en, p. 445.

3 Travels in Arabia, i. 281.

4 Ib., p. 92.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 527

for six or eight miles, " at an expense of labour and skill more Chinese
than Arabian." The channels are called feleji, and four or five such feleji
run to each large town or oasis. Similar irrigation tunnels were used in
Peru, Persia, and Afghanistan, and of course the custom, which must
have originated in a land of torrid summer heat, is of immemorial anti-
quity in Arabia.1

The charm of fresh water in a thirsty land, and the exquisitely courteous
and hospitable instincts of the true Arab, are illustrated together by an
incident which Wellsted declared himself, years afterwards, to be unable to
recall without emotion. He was sitting under a tree in melancholy mood,
with a countenance to match, when a passing Arab saw him, sympathized,
gave the salutation of peace, and, pointing to the crystal stream at his feet,
said : " Look, friend, for running water maketh the heart glad ; " then
bowed, and passed on his way.2

Von Maltzan found the Chinese and Syrian rule, against purchases or
presents being made or accepted by persons in authority, in force in South
Arabia ; and wished that he had happened to light upon a less scrupulous
Cadi, when a purchase from one might have been made in all good faith,
had the law allowed.3 Slavery in Arabia also retains its archaic laxity ;
if displeased with his master, the slave can go to the Cadi and demand
a public sale, and the master cannot, even for criminal offences, put the
slave to death without public trial. If the slave has a wife who bears
children, they and the wife must be sold with the father.

In all capital proceedings Arab justice is described as leisurely and
cautious, appeals are allowed and executions postponed for months or
altogether. " Nor can the most absolute rulers of Arabia violate with im-
punity the restrictions placed by a sense of responsibility and humanity on
the too rapid course of such trials, or venture to condemn a subject to
death in time of peace simply on their own authority, or without the
stated intervention of legal proceedings."4

Wellsted was struck by the " extraordinary care and affection" for the
persons of their sheikhs displayed by the Bedouin tribes of Oman, as well
as by the curiously constitutional character of the Sheikh government,
which he describes as a political phenomenon in the history of nations,
that, although neither a republic, an aristocracy, nor a kingdom, never-
theless possesses the elements of all those modes of government. ''Al-
though the grand sheikhs of the principal tribes have in some cases the
power of life and death, and also that of declaring war and peace, yet their
authority ... is abridged by the aged and other influential men of
the tribe. In civil and criminal affairs they act rather as arbiters than
judges, and cases of importance are sometimes debated by the whole
tribe."5

1 The chief overseer of the annual water distribution is an officer mentioned in the in-
scriptions. Bur gen u. Schlosser, p. 359.

2 L.c., i. p. 172. 3 ReiseNach Sud-Arabien, p. 163.

4 Palgrave, Narrative, i. p. 229.

5 Travels, i. p. 360.

528 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

In Hadramaut the government is nominally hereditary, but the order of
primogeniture was not unfrequently set aside by some more powerful
member of the same family, as has probably at all times been the rule
throughout the country. Oman seems to have inspired Palgrave with an
enthusiasm for the ideal of Chinese political philosophers whose anarchist
aspirations seem to have been realized there, with exceptional completeness.
He attributes the prosperity of the State to the absence of government
regulation, monopoly, centralization ; of government religion, education,
control and patronage, "the first, often the only office of government is
that of magistrates : their capital affair to assure their subjects the quiet
enjoyment of what Arabs not inaptly call the * three precious things,' viz.,
their life, their household honour and their property;" such has been the
almost uniform course of the Omanee administration, which the author
contrasted with that of the Wahhabis, who, with twice the territory, had
only half the population and not one-twentieth the revenue or wealth.
Omanee history offers "centuries of quiet well-doing, thriving towns,
thickly peopled land, princes loved by their subjects, and subjects rendered
prosperous by their princes." l

All this is not dissimilar to the records of various stocks of Arab origin
in Africa, but they seem to apply to the Arab most in proportion as he is
least of a Mahomedan. Wellsted and Palgrave agree again as to the
position of women in Oman. They are famous for their beauty and
vivacity, and " enjoy more liberty . . . and are more respected than
in any other Eastern country." 2 " In Oman the mutual footing of the
sexes is almost European, and the harem is scarcely less open to visitors
than the rest of the house." One wife only has full legal honours and
title, and the laws of inheritance also differ from those of the Koran, "the
share of the female being here equal to that of the male instead of only
half."3 Women do not wear the face veil, wine is freely drunk and tobacco
smoked, and, if it must also be admitted that morals are lax and witch-
craft common, so that Oman bears the name of " the land of Enchanters,"
we may at least regard these failings as representing survivals from the
common estate of primitive man rather than a degeneracy due to the evil
influence of European example.

Even the race of martial heroines is not yet extinct. Suweik, on the
coast between Sohar and Burka, and Rostak, south of Suweik, inland on a
line towards Nizzuwah, were defended, just before Wellsted's visit, by the
wife and sister of Sheikh Seyyid Hillal, when the latter was absent or
imprisoned; the wife refusing to surrender even if her husband were cut to
pieces before her eyes.4 And when the son of Feysul led an expedition
against the Ajman Bedouin, the Bedouin army " was, according to custom,

1 Narrative, ii. pp. 290-2. The benignity of these princes extends to foreigners, and
Palgrave, who was shipwrecked on their coast, found the hospitable usage ascribed to the
town of Phasis in full force there. Ante, p. 457.

2 Travels, \. p. 354. 3 Narrative, ii. pp. 177, 263, 330.
4 Ib., i. p. 193. lb., ii. p. 71.

ANCIENT ARABIA. 529

preceded by a Hadee'yal, that is, a maiden of good family and better
courage, who, mounted amid the fore-ranks on a camel, has to shame the
timid and excite the brave by satirical or encomiastic recitations." Her
death by a Nejdean lance is said to have decided the rout of the Ajman
army.

The occasional occurrence of blue eyes among the Arabs has been
mentioned before,1 and in connection with the Egyptian drawings of fair-
haired, blue-eyed Semites, it is interesting to find that an ancient Arab
heroine, who was proverbial for her long sight, was called Zerca ei
Yemamah, because the far-seeing eyes were blue.2 And a suggestion has
presented itself lately, from an unlikely quarter, as to the sort of race
which might be produced from a mixture of the two physical types repre-
sented on the earliest monuments and in the earliest tombs of Egypt.
A half-caste race has arisen of late years on the west coast of Greenland,
of mixed Eskimo and European (mainly Danish) blood, the members of
which, according to Nansen, "have as a rule a somewhat Southern
appearance, with their dark hair, dark eyebrows and eyes, and brown
complexion." 3 He adds that a remarkably Jewish cast of appearance
sometimes appears amongst them. If a cross between the Aryan and
the Eskimo produces a variety so distinct and so unlike to either parent,
a cross between Semites and Akkadians might very easily have resulted
in the somewhat similar product exemplified in Punite and Egyptian
features .

1 Ante, p. 277.

2 Caussin de Perceval. Essais sur Vhistoire des Arabes avant V Islamisme, i. p. 101.

3 Eskimo Life, 1893, p. 19.

P.C.

M M

CHAPTER IX,

HAMITIC AFRICAN TRIBES.

EGYPTIAN monuments of the Ethiopian Dynasty show that the rule of
descent for the royal family was the same as in Egypt, or with the female
element still more strongly insisted on. In the Stele of the Coronation,1
the descent of King Aspalut is given for seven generations on the maternal
side, from "his mother, the royal sister," So-and-so, "whose mother was
the royal sister," etc., etc., while his father's father only is named. Among
the kings of Meroe, if one died, his consort succeeded, with the son in a
secondary position ; if the consort died, the son was at once associated in
the crown.

Makrizi and other Arab writers give a similar account of the Begas and
other Nubian tribes met with in the early days of Islam. And Lepsius
describes a modern Ethiopian princess, Nasr, the sister of a former sultan,
who was treated with peculiar respect because she was descended on the
mother's side from the legitimate royal house. Throughout Northern
Africa, numerous non-negro tribes have preserved the same family custom
unchanged certainly for many centuries, in spite of the conversion to Islam
of those who observe them.

Ibn Batuta mentions as a curious custom that, among the Berber princes,
the succession went, not to the sons of the king, but to his sister's sons ; 2
and other Arab chroniclers mention this custom as peculiar to the Berbers
and the natives of Malabar. The district between the Red Sea, the
Upper Nile, and the Abyssinian highlands is occupied by tribes of Berber
origin, with customs of varying degrees of purity. The tribes of the Beni
Amer, whose customs represent the middle stage of Mahomedan influence,
have a marriage law not unlike that of the Gortyn code. There are two
kinds of marriage — that by purchase, and marriage with community of
goods.3 If the husband divorces his wife, they both reclaim their own
private property, and the common stock is divided in half ; the house and
its contents, however, all go to the woman, and the weapons to the man.
The woman may divorce in two ways — by simply leaving the man or by
formal complaint on account of ill-treatment or infidelity.4 If the woman
dies, leaving children, the man takes care of her property in trust for

1 Records of the Past, vol. vi. p. 76.

2 In describing the similar customs of a negro tribe in the Soudan, the Arab traveller
adds that it is only met with besides among the pagan Hindoos of Malabar.

3 W. Munzinger. Ost-afrikanische Studien (1864), p. 319 ff.

4 Cf. ante, p. 477.

HAMITIC AFRICAN TRIBES. 531

them, and it is made over to them if he marries again. If he dies, she
retains everything while unmarried, as in China. The bride remains a full
year in her father's house after the betrothal ; and though there is said to
be no law to this effect, the custom is general among the East African tribes
as well as among the Kabyles.

The language, " To bedauie," that of the old so-called Bedja or Bega,
is spoken by all the Bishareen and Hadendowa tribes and by a part of the
Beni Amer. The women, according to Munzinger, have more privileges
by custom than law ; they receive presents from their husbands, and have
a great esprit de corps among themselves. A woman may at any time
return to her mother's house and stay there for months together, telling
her husband to come to her there if he wants her. Among the Bogos,
married women are not required to work — a marked contrast to the in-
dustrious Abyssinians. Friends and relations help to build the house for
the newly married couple. Wives affect not to care for their husbands,
but value their brothers beyond everything. Married women do not eat
with their husbands or speak his name before strangers. They make
parties to go out together, kill a cow and feast ; they have a strong feeling
of honour, and their protection is safer than a man's. Polygamy is the
exception. In case of divorce the children stay with the mother. The
Beni Amer women weave palm mats, which are sold to pay the taxes, while
the men mind the herds.

A curious Spartan-like institution was met with by Dr. Juncker among
the Begas. The title of Akhir el Benat, " Defender of the village maiden,"
was won by Bega youths in a sort of flogging duel of endurance. And
it is said that formerly in tribal wars the Arabs used to bear the fairest
maiden of the tribe in the 'Otsa, a kind of cage, on a camel, into the
midst of the fight, in the defence of which the warriors of the tribe put out
all their strength. At the same time it is seen that this sort of chivalry is
not incompatible with Amazonian tendencies, for there is a story of a
young and beautiful maiden, who was shot fighting on the side of the
Sharqieh Arabs in 182O.1

The Barea and Kunama have only adopted the religion of Islam in a
perfunctory manner. They say they are a peculiar people, and have
nothing to do with either Mahomedans or Christians. They have no
gods, idols, or temples. They believe in amulets, and have a priestly rain-
maker, who, however, may be deposed and even stoned if unsuccessful,
in which case he is succeeded by his brother or nephew. They observe
a festival in November after harvest, but " their real religion is an extra-
ordinary respect for old age." 2 Parents are highly esteemed, and a son
even if blamed unjustly, does not defend himself. Mothers are much be-
loved and tenderly cared for in age, and their fields cultivated by the sons.
Complete personal equality is the rule ; the commune is formed of the
villagers individually, and the family itself has no political significance.

1 Travels in Africa, 1875-8, by Dr. Wm. Juncker, p. 135.

2 Munzinger, p. 474.

532 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

In all these points the custom of the tribes in question is strongly con-
trasted with that of the surrounding population. Before a man builds his
own house, i.e. marries, he is in his father's power, and the latter takes all
his earnings. The maternal uncle decides about the life and liberty of the
child, and may let it be sold in time of famine, but slavery is rare and
mild. Ancient maxims are quoted under the name of Butha^ as having
the force of law, and one of these declared, long before Rousseau and
the American Declaration of Independence: "Men are naturally free, and
can never lose their liberty." Private quarrels are not allowed to spread,
as the community is always on the side of peace. Whoever is accused
must appear and answer before the elders, and banishment, the severest
punishment inflicted, would follow rebellion against their award. Proof
consists of oath and evidence. In places the old rule of inheritance by
brother's or sister's son is interfered with by Mahomedan law.1

There is no distinction between noble and plebeian classes ; few ser-
vants are employed ; the name used for them signifies " wages " or " hire."
The time of paid service lasts from the rains till harvest ; and besides
his pay the servant has certain days on which he uses his master's oxen
for himself and can plough a little field. According to Munzinger, the
leading characteristic of the local law is that persons are rated very high
and things very low. No one may be enslaved for offences against
property, or debt. Even slaves can emancipate themselves by leaving
their master and settling in another village. The same rule of inheritance,
by brothers' and sisters' sons,, is followed by slave and free ; children
follow the mother's status. Illegitimate children are received without
offence in the mother's family. Landed property is seldom sold. The
embarrassed proprietor as a rule only gives his land to the purchaser as
a pledge, which he can redeem at any time on payment of the price re-
ceived.2 Land is plentiful, and leave to cultivate any portion not in use
can be had for the asking, the occupier giving the owner in such cases
a small share of the produce at harvest.

The distinction between the abstract right of ownership, which has
virtually no money value, and the right of occupancy or use, which
appears so perplexingly in Egyptian and Malabar law, may have origin-
ated under similar conditions, when larger tracts were claimed as
property, to be grazed or traversed at will, than there was any thought of
utilizing for cultivation. The cultivating occupier would have no need
or wish to obtain this half-political sort of ownership, which is absolutely
worthless as regards a tiny field, and yet resembles in kind the jurisdiction
by which a negro king can exclude or put to ransom foreign caravans.

Grass, wood, and straw, even on cultivated land, are regarded as com-
mon property. Theft is treated as debt, and the stolen goods are reclaimed
by force. If the thief repents, and comes with an elder of his family or
village to apologize, a small present is accepted, and full restitution is not
insisted on. The people live in close villages made up of enclosed

1 Munzinger, p. 481. 2 /£., p. 492.

HAMITIC AFRICAN TRIBES. 533

homesteads or several huts within a hedge.1 Agriculture is the chief pur-
suit, and the community tills the fields of any one who is sent abroad at
its bidding.

Morality is as lax as possible, except in the case of married couples.
Adultery is very rare, and the Barea women especially are famous and
much sought after as the most faithful wives. The order of inheritance
among them and other tribes is as follows : Brother by the same mother ;
eldest son of mother's eldest son ; second son of ditto ; son of younger
sister ; own sister or sister's child. The child often receives the name of
the grandfather or maternal uncle. On occasion of a marriage the bride-
groom makes presents to the bride's mother, to her maternal uncle and
grandfather, and to the father and paternal aunt, besides what goes to the
bridal pair as joint property. The father is not obliged to give anything
to his daughter, but it is common for him to do so in token of affection.

A widow may not marry her husband's heir till after three years'
mourning — nearly the only instance of such a period out of China. The
whole village follows a corpse to the grave. Each family has for a
sepulchre a tolerably roomy cave or hollow, approached by a deep shaft
and closed with a stone, like the Egyptian graves of kings or pyramid
owners. Both sexes join in the wailing ; the village mourns for a week,
and the family for a year, like the Georgians.2 The people live friendly
and peaceable lives at home, but abroad are famed and feared as robbers.
Their manners are very gentle and polite, and this is most noticeable in
the most secluded tribes. The richer and more prosperous a Barea
becomes, the more liberal and temperate he appears. They are mutually
helpful, most hospitable and merciful even to strangers. Widows and
orphans are never wronged or ill treated. They are fond of songs, of
which they have a great number. The German traveller who records the
above particulars, concludes by describing them as perhaps the most
genuinely democratic people to be met with anywhere in the world.
Disputes and civil wars are impossible among them, and he adds : " So
peculiar a republic might vegetate on for millenniums if it could be isolated
from all foreign contact." 3

It is hardly necessary to observe that this is just what is proved to have
occurred, and that the manners and customs of these tribes, both in regard
to the living and the dead, have remained unchanged since the distant
period when the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, and the " divine Pelasgi " were
the leading representatives of culture and humanity on the shores of the
Mediterranean. The whole reach of country in Northern Africa behind
the petty kingdoms of the coast, which used to be loosely called Barbary,
is occupied, more or less continuously, by tribes of the same order. The
customs of the Kabyles in Algeria have been carefully collected by MM.
Hanoteau and Letourneur, and those of the independent tribes further
inland and westward have been described, though in less detail, by Barth,
Faidherbe, and Duveyrier. Travellers are struck by the white complexion
1 /£., p. 516. 2 Ib., pp.488, 528. 3 ib.t p. 534.

534 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

and European features of the Kabyle tribes in the Algerian highlands, and
the Egyptian monuments show us Libyans of the same Caucasian type; but
a distinction like that between the white and red Syrians of Strabo must
have prevailed originally, and it seems as if the Berbers of the interior had,
till recently, at any rate, retained to some extent the red complexion
characteristic of the old Hamitic stock.

In the sixteenth century the Berber tribes in an army were distinguished
as the Reds and the Blacks ; in the thirteenth century it was said that the
kings of Bornu on Lake Tsad were of a red complexion, and the word
" ja " (red) was still used in Earth's time as a complimentary epithet in songs
praising a local governor. General Faidherbe says 1 that only about one
in ten of the Berber population are blonde, but the proportion is larger in
some tribes than others. He doubts the effect of climate alone upon the
complexion, because there are Berbers fair enough to pass for Flemings,
and refers to the statement of Scylax that all the Libyans were fair and
handsome. But he points out that by intermarrying with a darker or a
fairer race any stock may change colour, and that more than once, as in the
case of Shereefs, whose families pass from Mecca to the Soudan and back,
and in successive generations turn from Arab to negro, and from negro to
Arab, without forfeiting the right to the green turban. Complexion, lan-
guage and religion may change, but customs as old as the Pyramids linger
through all such vicissitudes, and as they are never borrowed by strangers,
they are infallible evidence to the antiquity of the people among whom
they survive.

Very little trace remains of the archaic Berber family law, but the cha-
racteristic antichretic pledge or mortgage still flourishes under the name of
rahnia : the old Hamitic genius for association survives, and local self-
government, on lines clearly marked by custom, shows a vigour and per-
sistency hardly to be paralleled out of China. The village is the political
unit ; 2 two or more villages supposed to have a certain degree of affinity
form a tribe ; certain tribes form a confederation, and organization seldom
goes further than this. Scattered hamlets may associate and form a village
for administrative purposes, and the village is sub-divided into kharoubas,
answering more or less to the Chinese " neighbourhood : " the word is
derived from the cluster of pods of the carouba tree, and denotes an aggre-
gation of families supposed to be related to each other. The family itself
is undivided, and includes father, mother, sons and their wives, their chil-
dren, grandchildren, uncles, aunts, and cousins. The family is supreme,
and in the case of murder or any other crime, it may choose whom it
pleases or thinks fit to deliver up as a victim.

The village council, or dgemaa, includes all the citizens, but age and
wealth have a practical ascendency, and any speaker claiming the ears of
the assembly without the customary qualifications would be promptly
silenced. The dgemaa levies taxes, consisting of a so-called tithe, generally

1 Collection complete des Inscriptions Numidiques (1870), pp. 17-25.

2 Les Kabyles et les coutumes Kabyles, MM. Hanoteau et Letourneur, vol. ii. p. 4 ff.

HAMIT1C AFRICAN TRIBES. 535

equivalent to about two per cent, of the harvest. Private persons are
entitled to help from their neighbours in certain works, such as building a
house, and mutual assistance is due by law in other cases as well. There
are fruit gardens in many places belonging to the poor, and anywhere a
hungry man may gather what he can eat upon the spot. A woman with a
jar of water must give the stranger drink ; travellers must be helped, if
necessary, by the loan or hire of beasts of burden at the customary charge,
and hospices are provided in snowy mountains.

The organization of public hospitality has already been described ; the
thimecheref, or division of meat, which is regarded as a survival from the
ancient practice of common meals, sometimes takes the form of a public
feast held on occasions of private interest, such as a birth or marriage.
Charity is active, and a beggar is never refused a meal ; but beggars are
rare, because families would consider themselves disgraced by allowing one
of their number to become a burden on the public. Wealthy householders,
in Aristotle's words, divide the poor between them ; young orphans left
without near relatives are taken and started in life by well-to-do families ;
and this is done, as among the Chinese, not as a duty or a virtue, but as a
simple custom. Great respect is shown for individual rights of property,
except so far as they are restricted by ancient custom in the common
interest. As in ancient Egypt it is unlawful to open windows whereby you
may see into your neighbour's house. Ploughs, which are worth a sove-
reign or more, are habitually left out in the field at night, only the yoke and
harness of the draught animals being taken home ; but they are protected
by a rational superstition, " He who steals a plough will die of hunger ;" and
the theft, though not visited with any specially severe punishment, is re-
garded as infamous.1 It is forbidden to throw dirt or rubbish into the
village street. One tribe fines those who do not plant at least ten fig trees
in the year ; and in another village, where the dgemaa meets on Thursday,
it is said that no one works on that day, and it is customary to let the poor
have the use of their neighbour's oxen for ploughing.2

Taken singly, most of these customs might have been met with any-
where, but if we compare them collectively with early codes of Germanic
or other tribes in Western Europe, it is evident that they belong to an
entirely different order. There is a more fastidious civilization, a much
stronger sense of social obligations, and less provision for dealing with
individual contentiousness. Courage, gentleness, generosity, industry, and
respect for old age are but a few of the virtues enumerated by Ibn
Khaldoun as distinctive of the Berber race,3 and its decline in political
importance does not seem to have impaired these personal characteristics.

There is also, alongside of the family and local organization, a curious
sort of quasi-political association called the fof, of a purely voluntary char-

1 By Phrygian law the theft of a plough or the slaughter of a ploughing ox were pun-
ished with death. Cf. New Chapters in Greek History, 1892, by Percy Gardner, p. 37.

2 /£., vol. iii. p. 422.

3 Hist, des Berberes, tr. by M. G. de Slane, vol. i. p. 200.

536 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

acter, embracing those villagers who, from personal or other motives,
choose to combine for purposes of mutual assistance and defence. Differ-
ent tribes in case of need call upon friendly gofs for help, which is always
faithfully given. The head of the gof has to exercise hospitality, and
receives no reward except of an honorific kind : the village headman
requires to have the support of a powerful gof, and the fact that this im-
portant kind of organization exists apart from the equally real base of union
furnished by the village and the tribe, may perhaps warrant the conjecture
that in Carthage and the Phoenician colonies generally there may have
been the same tendency towards a double organization, which would ex-
plain the apparent discrepancies in some of our authorities.

Another conception which forms an important item in Kabyle society is
that of the anaia, or " protection." An individual, a village, a gof, or a
tribe may give its anaia, and is then bound to hold its protege safe against
all harm or injury. Every Kabyle possesses by right the anaia of his tribe,
and is required to merit its protection by devotion to the common interest,
to frequent its markets by preference, and generally show loyalty to the
community. It is possible that a somewhat similar idea is at the bottom
of the title borne by the Nayars (or Nairs), who are called Protectors or
leaders of the people : and we should at least seek vainly among men of
any other race than the primitive pacific stock for an example of a militia,
or military class which exercises no control over the people of the country
for its own advantage, and only sets the fashion of customs sufficiently
convenient to be adopted without compulsion.

The Kabyle village as a rule pays a teacher for the children, though
sometimes he is provided for by boarding with different households in suc-
cession.1 The so-called kanoun, or customary code of law, which each
village possesses, is in many cases written, and so far as family customs
are concerned, they have the same transitional character as the customs
of the Eastern tribes already described. The distinction between the
contract or betrothal and the consummation of the marriage has already
been mentioned as recalling the two stages in Egyptian marriage contracts,
the accepting and the establishing a wife, and it is noticeable that the
father who declines to give up his daughter after the betrothal contract
has been entered into, is required to pay a heavier fine than the husband,
who, under the same circumstances, refuses to receive his bride. Evi-
dently such a provision was not injurious to the privileges of Moslem
husbands, and was therefore suffered to linger in the statute book, but it
is at least equally obvious that when offences are visited by fine, the
heavier penalty is allotted to the more serious injury ; and if, in Barbary,
damages for breach of promise to marry are calculated on a more liberal
scale to disappointed bridegrooms than to rejected brides, it is probable
that once on a time men had more to gain materially by marriage than
women.

Another curious privilege is secured to wives. If a woman chooses to
1 Like school teachers in American country districts.

HA MIT 1C AFRICAN TRIBES. 537

" revolt," and quit her husband, taking refuge with her father or in the house
of any other respectable protector, she cannot be compelled to return to
her husband. This is one of the cases in which ancient Kabyle custom
seems to have been too strong for the Koran ; and while the national temper
remained unaltered, the extension given to the legal authority of husbands
would only make it the more necessary to allow aggrieved wives something
answering to the right of sanctuary possessed by slaves in Egypt. Practi-
cally, however, the custom is tantamount to a right of divorce to be exer-
cised by the wife at will ; of course custom and public opinion are so
strong that the remedy is only resorted to in extreme cases ; but the right
must be regarded as a survival from a state of things analogous to that
which prevailed in China before Confucius, when the chronicler constantly
records how the daughter of Duke this, who had been married to Earl that,
" returned to her father's house at Loo."

One other trait which survives from the pre-Mahomedan period resembles
the right of sanctuary, as it were, possessed by women among the Iberians.
Any injury or insult is considered to be aggravated if it is inflicted in the
presence of the women of the other side ; even the rekba^ or vengeance
for blood, must not be claimed before the female relatives of the guilty
person ; l nor must a creditor claim his dues offensively in their presence,
— reservations which have their parallels both in Irish and Basque law.

The proprietary rights of women and the rule of succession have been
much modified by Moslem law. By most " canons " the widow has the
right to live on her husband's property with her sons, as in China ; if there
are daughters only, sometimes she and they retain the whole while un-
married, and sometimes they take a half or third only, and the agnates the
rest. A widow or child not properly provided for by the family may be
protected by the village headman, as if the traditions of public opinion
were of a more liberal type than the law fixing the technical rights of male
relatives. One tribe expressly limits the right of women to inherit, lest
they should take property out of the tribe on marriage, which shows that
the custom of marrying within the tribe was not insisted on. One canon
recognises the right of the widow to remain and act as her children's
guardian, but in that case she must not marry a stranger and bring him to
her husband's house, though she may bring a near relative of his own
there.2

The right of chefaa, or pre-emption, when family property is offered for
sale, is reserved to co-heirs, co-proprietors or partners, relatives in the
order of succession, and then to members of the Kharouba, of the village,
and of the confederation ; 3 so that virtually land can only be sold with
the consent of the tribe or " the people of the land," as in the days of
Ephron the Hittite. As in Egypt, the vendor undertakes to guarantee the
purchaser against all disturbance by third parties.

No written code ever describes the normal working of joint and undi-
vided family ownership, but the character of the " insubordinate son," i.e.
1 Vol. iii. p. 190. 2 Ib. iii. p. 410. 3 Ib., ii. p. 401.

538 FROM MASS ALIA TO MALABAR.

one who has separated his interest from the family, is recognised by the
Kabyles, and this proceeding is viewed as so far criminal as to be visited
with fines. The insubordinate son forfeits his claim to maintenance, but
he shares in the inheritance on his father's death.

Earth had not the same facilities for investigating in detail the usages
of the tribes he visited as the French writers whose exhaustive account of
Kabyle custom has been utilized above,, but he records several facts of
interest. He describes the polity of the ancient Berber kingdom of Bornu
as originally " entirely aristocratical, based upon a council of twelve chiefs,
without whose assent nothing of importance could be undertaken by the
king." 1 Lucas, a still earlier traveller, describes the Bornu kingdom as an
elective monarchy, the privilege of choosing a successor among the sons
of a deceased king, without regard to priority of birth, being conferred by
the nation on three of the most distinguished men of the country. The
newly elected king further bound himself by oath to respect the ancient
institutions of the country and to employ himself for its glory.

Such curious constitutionalism is incredible in Africa apart from the red
race, and the other marked characteristic of the stock, the importance of
the mother and descent through women, appears in the same locality.
The Kanuri, a people of Bornu, still retain traces of a time when descent
was traced in the female line. They " call people in general, but princi-
pally their kings, always after the name of their mother, and the name of
the mother is always added in chronicles as a circumstance of the greatest
importance. Thus the famous king D'unama ben Selma'a is known in
Bornu generally only by the name of Dibalami, from the name of his
mother Dibala ... his mother's name preceding his individual
name, which is followed by the name of his father." 2 The name of a
queen mother is not infrequently included in lists of reigning sovereigns,
and one such lady is recorded to have imprisoned her royal son for the
space of a year.

Other characteristic traits mentioned by Barth are " the great care
which the Songhay bestowed upon their dead," which "appears to have
been traditionally handed down from the remotest antiquity ; " 3 and the
fact that " everything sold in the market is measured and weighed by an
officer ; " indeed, the police of the markets among the Kabyles is as com-
plete as in the Chow Li, and all affairs are settled in the market place.
Another curiously Chinese trait is attributed to them. They have a
standard of value — a piece of iron, a Spanish coin, a measure of dates —
but they do not give the bar a certain size and let the price of other things
fluctuate as iron is scarce or plentiful, cheap or dear. " If iron becomes
cheap," says an author who admires the metaphysical subtlety of the
device, " two bars of iron go to the bar, and if it becomes dear, half a bar
of iron goes to the bar. The ideal standard is preserved because it is

1 Travels in Northern and Central Africa, vol. ii. p. 270.

. p. 273.
3 Ib., iv. p. 427.

HAMITIC AFRICAN TRIBES. 539

ideal. Yet here are barbarians." 1 The " pound " in Chinese markets
varies in exactly the same way,2 and the discussions of Chinese Ricardos
concerning " light " and " heavy " money are rendered mysterious to
Europeans by the predominance of this confusion of ideas.

Monogamy is still the rule in many tribes in spite of Mahomedanism,
and the ascendency of women is greatest in the most secluded, central
regions of the Sahara. " The women," says Earth, " appear to have the
superiority over the male sex in the country of As'ben, at least to a certain
extent; so that when a ba A'sbenchi marries a woman from another
village, she does not leave her dwelling-place to follow her husband, but
he must come to her in her own village," 3 just as in Arabia the husband
from a strange tribe was required to join his wife's kinsmen.

The ascendency of women is still more marked among the wild Towarek
tribes (or, as they call themselves, Imoschag). There the chiefs are
succeeded by their sister's eldest son, and M. Duveyrier noted that the
principal role is played by women "in all exceptional customs of the
Touaregs." According to popular tradition among the Azdjers, at the
time of the first settlement, a chief invited to court all the " dowagers "
of the other tribes, i.e. " all the noble ladies who had the privilege of
giving birth to chiefs," 4 and each of these ladies received an appanage of
land for her tribe. Women with a reputation for wisdom take part in the
tribal councils, and they sometimes act as sheiks. They insist upon mono-
gamy, and would divorce a husband who took another wife.

On the other hand, though divorce is legal, a man does not in practice
venture to repudiate one wife and take another without arranging a provi-
sion for the first, just as the ancient Egyptians bound themselves to do by
marriage contract. The Towarek wife is not required to contribute to the
support of the family ; she inherits, but does not spend, and so grows
rich by accumulation of revenue. At Rhat the author was informed that
nearly all landed property was in the hands of women, and the attainment
of a similar result in ancient Sparta may be conjectured to have followed
from the observance of similar customs both as to expenditure and inheri-
tance. Before marriage they enjoy complete liberty : a girl will mount her
camel and ride thirty leagues to visit a lover ; but unfaithfulness after
marriage is almost unknown, and divorce rare for the reasons given above.
The eldest son of the eldest sister is head of the family.

They are divided into noble, servile, and mixed tribes ; the former do
no work, their chief occupation being to ensure the safety of the roads
in the interest of commerce ; that is to say, they protect their own people,
levy blackmail or tribute on allied or friendly tribes, and frankly plunder
strangers or enemies. The Dutch lady traveller, Miss Tinne, who perished

1 The Pillars of Hercules, by D. Urquhart, vol. ii. p. 113.

2 Post, vol. ii. ch. xxviii.
8 Loc. cit., i. p. 340.

4 Les Touaregs du Nord, p. 323. By the late Henri Duveyrier, 1864. Cf, Visscher's
Letters from Malabar, p. 56, where four royal houses are mentioned "consisting of
princesses whose sons are in the line of succession."

540 FROM MASS A LI A TO MALABAR.

by an attack in this country, might probably have escaped if her party
had been sufficiently well acquainted with the local customs to have in-
voked the universal " rights of women " as a ground for respect. At
harvest time these warriors receive a sort of tithe from the cultivators
under their protection, whose oases they visit in turn. When caravans are
in motion, they haunt the roads to levy tribute, and at other times of year
are fed by their serfs. They are naturally fair till tanned by the sun, with
Caucasian features, and can stand any change of climate.

It is remarked of them, as of the Cretans, that their slaves and serfs do
not revolt. The latter may change patrons by gift or inheritance, but are
not sold. They probably consist of conquered natives who have accepted
their masters' habits. Among the vassal tribes there is one called the
Reds and another the Blacks. The chiefs are elected, and the king is often
deposed and succeeded by a sister's son. The people are very scrupulous
in regard to the property of their friends or fellow-tribesmen ; deposits are
held sacred, and debts, as to which there is no evidence or witness, are
paid spontaneously, sometimes after an interval of twenty years, and at
the cost of a desert journey to the debtor. They abstain from fish, like
the ancient Egyptians. Camels are the chief articles of property and the
chief interest, so that " I give news of the camels, all is well," were the
first words that occurred to a scholar whom General Faidherbe asked
for a specimen of the written character.

The Towarek are the only Berbers who have retained the memory of
the old Berber character called tefinagh or tifinar'. The girls go to school,
and can nearly all read and write, and according to M. Hanoteau,1 some
are better informed than the majority of men among the Algerian Mos-
lems. They have no written books, the character being used for songs,
inscriptions on rocks or caves, and devices on shields, clothes, and weapons.
Consonants alone are written, and when reading an unseen text, they
spell it, trying each vowel in turn till they make sense. When M. Duvey-
rier asked for lessons in writing, he was referred to the women,2 as among
the Azdjers more women than men can write, though for the most part
badly. They write indifferently up and down, and from the right or left,
and the women sometimes deliberately transpose letters, so as to make the
meaning doubtful to the uninitiated. There is nothing sacred about the
writing ; but being a kind of mystery, like the Norse runes, a kind of talis-
manic virtue is evidently attributed to an inscription, and those quoted by
General Faidherbe3 are instructive, especially when we learn that they
are the only ones he could obtain.

The first is an inscription on a shield made by the maternal aunt of a
chief; it will be better to reproduce the French version, rather than risk
some loss of accuracy by re-translation. " C'est moi, Reicha qui ai dit :
je te retiens pour kmoi seul ; ne vas pas vers d'autres femmes que moi."

1 Essai de Grammaire de la langue 7*amaschekt 1860.

2 Les Touaregs du Nord, p. 388.

3 Collection complete des Inscriptions Arumidiques, p. 58 ff.

HAMITIC AFRICAN TRIBES. 541

" Taket Tekfelt a dit : je reserve pour moi seule parmi les femmes le
maitre du bouclier. C'est moi, Agmama qui ai dit, Salut aux filles de
Hamelen." On a bracelet belonging to a Towarek chief was written :
" C'est moi, Takounit qui ai dit : je me reserve Bedda le maitre du brace-
let. Depuis que je suis ne'e je jeune, maintenant j'ai besoin que tu
m'apprennes a manger; je suis malade du chagrin que tu me causes."
Another legend on a bracelet runs : " C'est moi, Fatimata qui ai dit :
le maitre du bouclier est defendu aux femmes sous peine de peche."
Shorter scrolls say merely . " C'est moi, Sousen qui ai dit : je reponds
du maitre du bouclier." " C'est moi, Tasnout quiaiditrje defends les
femmes de plaire au maitre du bouclier," or " C'est moi, Fatima."

These legends are particularly interesting as expressing the point of view
of the women themselves in a community of the sort which appears to
strangers to be under the rule of women. According to one of their
proverbs, love is an affair of " the eye and the heart ;" but the Towarek
view differs from that of the Troubadours in this respect : the women,
though they prefer to be wooed, do not object to being won, and so far
from regarding marriage as fatal to love, they spend all their fascinations
to bind their lover to them for life in lawful, voluntary chains.

Earth comments on a physical peculiarity of the women in some of the
central tribes, resembling that of the Hottentots, who by language and
physique are affiliated to the Hamitic race, notwithstanding the low level
to which they have sunk in the social scale. Among the Hottentots the
sons take the family name of the mother, and the daughters that of the
father ; and the few travellers, who have been at the pains to observe
their moral character and mental qualities, give an account of both which
makes their supposed kinship by no means incredible, while the rude
sketches of animals with which they decorate their caves show a fidelity
and spirit exactly like that displayed by the artists of ancient Egypt.

Sir John Barrow, whose duties chanced to take him straight from
Southern Africa to China, did not even know that the Hottentots might
claim kindred with the Egyptians ; and he certainly could not have sur-
mised that a chain of evidence might be forged hereafter connecting the
latter people with the Chinese. He, was however, much struck with the
physical resemblance between the latter and the Hottentots. The form
of their persons, their manner of speaking, temper, colour, and features,
the shape and position of their eyes, appeared to him " nearly alike ; " the
curling hair of the Hottentots was the only marked difference, while the
mental resemblances were hardly less marked than the physical ones. u A
Hottentot who attended me in travelling over Southern Africa was so very
like a Chinese servant I had in Canton, both in person, features, manner,
and tone of voice, that almost always inadvertently I called him by the
name of the latter." 1

Very often, no doubt, the statements of genealogical descent or ethno-
logical affinity hazarded by the geographers or historians of antiquity
1 Travels in China, p. 49.

542 FROM MASSALIA 7V MALABAR.

rest only upon such perceptions of resemblance ; at the same time, when
observation is acute and accurate, the involuntary classifications suggested
by it are more likely to be right than wrong, and require some positive
evidence to invalidate them.

'" A Spanish traveller, early in the sixteenth century, was not less felicitous
in seizing resemblances. He imagines the island of Sokotra to be that of
the Amazons of which the Moors had tales to tell, for " there the women
administer property and manage it, without the husbands having a voice
in the matter."1 Barbosa may have sailed from Sokotra to Malabar,
touching at the Laccadives, where the real island of rumour was to be
found, on the return voyage, and he might thus have got the impression
that the distance between the two was inconsiderable. But even if he
was really referring to Abd-el-Kuri and some other small island on the
African coast, his observation is not the less interesting as a witness to the
diffusion of the Berber type. " Quite near to this island of Socotre," he
proceeds, " there are two other islands inhabited by coloured people and
blacks, like the people of the Canary Islands, without law or knowledge,
and they have no dealings with any other people."

The Berber origin of the Guanches, the original inhabitants of the
Canary Isles, is generally admitted on the evidence of language alone.
The Latin name for peas, Punicum deer, is derived from the Berber word
ikiker, used for pulse in general, and this was retained as hacichei by the
Guanche inhabitants of Teneriffe.

The Guanche vocabulary is significant as to the character of the family
relations. There are separate words for "legitimate son," " son of So-and-
so," and " son of the first wife," and another for " daughter of the first
wife." 2 Monogamy was the rule in all the islands ; there was no difference
of rank and no restrictions on marriage, except with a mother or sister.
In the island of Teneriffe, however, the king was always obliged to marry
a person of family equal to his own ; and if such could not be found, he
took his own sister to wife. At the time of the conquest, Gran Canaria
was governed by two princes with a council of twelve, and the island of
Palma was divided into twelve districts, each of which was governed by
its own lord or captain. Courts of justice were held in a public place by
kings and elders, and punishment was inflicted with the royal staff. As
among the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Chinese, the Naba-
tseans, and the men of Malabar, it was the custom for every one to carry a
long staff or pole.

The natives of Hierro lived in large circular enclosures, with walls of
dry stone, each containing about twenty families. As among the Basques
and Carians, the women ate apart from men and guests ; and we can re-
cognise the spirit of the common meals and the " distribution of meat "
in the rule that when fish were caught, every woman in the island with
young children received a share for each of them. Men meeting a woman

1 Description, etc. , by Duarte Barbosa, pp. 29, 30.

2 Histoire Naturelle des lies Canaries. Webb and Berthelot (1842), vol. i. p. 185.

HA MITIC AFRICAN TRIBES. 543

were required to turn away respectfully, which was the note of a well-
ordered State in ancient China. It was not lawful to enter a neighbour's
house without invitation ; the rules of propriety required those who had
business to stand outside and notify their presence by whistling.

Like the Babylonians, the natives " held the sun and moon in great
veneration, keeping an exact account of times in order to know when it
would be new or full moon or other days of devotion." l Brothers and
nephews succeeded in preference to sons, and the practice of lending
wives, as a matter of hospitality, prevailed, as on the borders of Tibet and
other primitive communities. It is probably in consequence of their
archaic marriage law, and the fact that they were governed solely by
democratic custom, that the Spaniards generally describe the Canarians
as "having no laws." The Franciscan friar previously quoted, who seems
to have sought candidly for information, describes them, on the contrary,
as "remarkable for their good government, regularity, and strict adminis-
tration of justice." They were loyal, and merciful, strictly faithful to all
their promises, and treated prisoners with gentleness and humanity. They
were social, cheerful, and very fond of singing and dancing.

The education of the young was cared for, and public opinion seems
to have been controlled by traditional moral saws of the Chinese and
Egyptian type. The writer, who has already observed that there are no
distinctions of rank, proceeds: "Their manner of conferring nobility was
very singular,"2 consisting in a sort of public examination into the cha-
racter and repute of a candidate. But the original statement is no doubt
correct, and the only mistake lies in the supposition that there was any
resemblance to a title of nobility as understood in Spain, in the public
recognition of members of the community as persons having honour and
esteem like the timuchi of Marseilles. A fragment of their moral teaching
confirms the impression that practical influence was reserved to a kind of
aristocracy of merit designated by common reputation, such as was the
original guide of Chinese rulers in their selection of " superior men " to
serve the State. " Be good, that you may be loved," it runs ; "despise the
wicked and deserve the esteem of good men, whose virtues and courage
are an honour to their country."3 The princes were required to take an
oath to make their subjects happy.

Wise women occupied a position of authority, like the female judges
of Ireland. The Spaniards owed their entrance to the island of Fuerta-
ventura to two of those women, who persuaded the people not to resist
the foreigners ; they were a mother and daughter, and it was said to be
the business of the one to settle and compose differences that might arise
among the chiefs of the island, and that of the other to regulate their
ceremonies.

1 History of the Discovery and Conquest of the Canary Islands, by Juan de Abreu de
Galindo(i632), tr. by George Glas (1764), p. 139.
3 /<*., p. 65.
3 Webb and Berthelot, p. 140.

544 FROM MASS A LI A TO MALABAR.

Glas, the translator of Galindo's history, adds on his own account that it
was believed, in the middle of the eighteenth century, that a great deal both
of Guanche blood and custom survived in the island, the most amiable
traits of the popular character being derived from this source rather than
from Spain. He was told that it was not uncommon for a lady to write
proposing marriage, and if the person addressed " does not think proper
to accept, he keeps it secret till death." On the other hand, " if a woman
can prove that a man has, in the least instance, endeavoured to win her
affections, she can oblige him to marry her." Both peculiarities date from
a very early period and the very peculiar race, which allowed women to
take whatever liberty or license they pleased, and yet held that they should
be protected against any social injury arising out of sexual relations against
their will. We have seen examples of this latter feeling in Egypt, and
as the Canarians preserved their dead by a rude but effective system of
mummification, no other resemblance can be thought surprising. In some
of the islands the people dwelt in many-chambered grottos, like the
Myrmidons, but the use of cave dwellings, as at Petra, and in the loess
districts in China, is so dependent on the character of the rock or stone
that it can scarcely be relied on as a race characteristic, as the remains of
Cyclopean architecture may be.

CHAPTER X.
MALABAR.

IF the comparative study of institutions were allowed to serve as evidence
of co-equal significance with that of language and physique, the existence
of a pre- or proto-Phoenician colony in Malabar is undoubtedly the first
hypothesis that would suggest itself to explain the resemblance between
Berber and Malabar usage noticed by the Arabs, and other equally notable
similarities. On the face of it, of course, nothing is more probable than
that "the first maritime and commercial people in the first ages of the
world," when trading from the Persian Gulf to India, should have estab-
lished a commercial colony on the Malabar Coast, which has been a
thriving centre of Eastern and Western trade for fifteen centuries, according
to what may be called modern evidence, and during that time has suffered
so little change that we need have no difficulty in crediting it with a past
of twice that duration.

The character of the earliest Malayali deeds, which do not go back
beyond the 8th cent. A.D., resembles that of undeciphered inscriptions
in Ceylon, and the language, according to Caldwell, is "practically Tamil :"
it has, however, "always been a matter of controversy whether Malayalam
is the mother, or sister, or daughter of Tamil/'1 and the view that it is the
archaic form of Tamil, before that became a written language, is certainly
favoured by the archaic character of the national institutions. It is a
branch of the Dravidian group of languages ; but it is wanting in the
verbal suffixes common to the Dravidian system of conjugation, and has
fallen back, according to Dr. Caldwell, to a " condition nearly resembling
the Mongolian, the Mantchu, and other rude primitive tongues of high
Asia," while Mr. Logan adds the comment : " The complete disappearance
of signs of personality in the Malayalam verb raises a doubt whether they
were ever really adopted in the colloquial language."2

The word for peacock in the Hebrew books of Kings and Chronicles
(tuki, tuki) has been derived from the old Tamil-Malayalam poetical name,
tokei^ the root of which varies between tuk and tok ; and Caldwell also sup-
poses the Greek name for cinnamon to be Malayalam.3 A number of the
names of places in S. India mentioned by Ptolemy end in ovp or ovpa=?
town ; and it has been proposed to identify the Greek name, Limurike,

1 A Commentary on Malabar Law and Custom. By Herbert Wigram (1882), p. ii.
3 Malabar. By W. Logan (published by the Government of India), vol. i. pp. 90, 91.
8 Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages, pp. 91, 3.
P.C. S45 N N

546 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

with Tamilike or the Tamil country. Other names given by Pliny and the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea have been plausibly identified with Tamil
words or places ; e.g. Automela, described by Pliny 1 as a noble emporium
of trade on the confluence of five rivers, may stand for Ettu Mala (eight
hills) or Attu Mala, river hill ; while in the vicinity of Oanganore, which
has always been an important trading centre, there is still to be found a
village called Annanadi, i.e. Anja-Nadi, or the five rivers.2 Pliny also
names "the Narese, enclosed by the loftiest of Indian mountains, Capita-
lia," which may serve for the Nairs enclosed by the W. Ghauts, and beyond
these "the Pandae, the only race in India ruled by women."

The Periplus mentions among local articles of commerce the pepper of
Kottanara (perhaps Kottaram or Kolattanad), and names Naoura, a mart,
and Mouziris, a seat of government in Limurike, the first of which names
speaks for itself, while Mouziris has been identified with Muyiri-kotta, near
Cranganore, the western capital of the Chera kings, whose dynasty was
extinguished 824 A.D. Mouziris is described as "a city at the height of pros-
perity, frequented as it is by ships from Ariake and Greek ships from Egypt."

The same writer has already explained that this Eastern trade was not
begun by the "Greek ships from Egypt" which carried it on in his day,
and we have every reason to believe it to have originated with the earliest
founders of South Arabian trade and navigation. At the present day
an important part of the population of Malabar consists of Moplahs or
Mapillahs, who are regarded as the descendants of Arab traders by the
women of the country. This class follows many of the most characteristic
native customs, and the obvious explanation of its existence is that it is
the product of a virtually continuous stream of migration from South
Arabia, corresponding to that which has peopled Abyssinia, Somali Land,
and North Africa generally with semi- Arab stocks.

The Nairs are supposed to have entered the country before the Nam-
butiri Brahmins, but neither are regarded as belonging to the original in-
habitants, who form the inferior castes. Mr. Wigram says of the Nairs :
" All that can be predicated of them with any degree of certainty is that
they were serpent worshippers, that they practised polyandry, and that
their land tenures point to a distinctly military organization;"3 and all of
these traits are shared with primitive Arabia.

There is no indigenous Malayalam word for caste, and the language of
the inhabitants of Minicoy, the most isolated of the Laccadive group,
where customs even more archaic than those of the mainland have been
preserved, is quite peculiar, only resembling Malayalam in the absence of
personal suffixes to the verbal tenses. Their notation is duodecimal, that
is to say, they count from ekke, i, to doloss, 12 ; doloss ekke is 13, phasihi
is 24, phasihi ekke 25, and so on ; 36, tindaloss ; 48, phanaos ; 60, phat-
taloss ; *]2, phahitti ; 84, haidoloss ; 96, hiya, while for 100 there are two
words, satti-ka, and hiya hattari or 96 + 4.

1 Nat. Hist., vi. 23, § 5. 2 Wigram, Commentary, p. ix.

8 Ib. , p. ii,

MALABAR. 547

Now it is inconceivable that a duodecimal notation should have been
invented by a simple race of boatmen, with nothing in particular to count
except their dried fish and cocoa-nuts ; still to count by twelves is an art
that might have been learnt, perhaps from more than one quarter. But
the sexagesimal system of ancient Babylonia is absolutely unique, and
where we meet with living traces of that most elaborate and scientific
system of calculation, it is surely easier to believe in its transmission than
in an independent creation. In Malabar the day is divided into sixty
portions of 24 minutes, each called a naliga ; these are subdivided into
sixty vinaligas of 24 seconds, and each of these into sixty "long letter
utterance times," equal to two-fifths of a second each.1 Can we doubt
that this translated fragment of " the wisdom of the Chaldees " was
dropped on the coast of India by some prehistoric ships of (eastern)
Tarshish, especially when numbers of the same type are found recurring
in the political constitution of the people ?

Before the British occupation, the Nayars or Nairs were at once the
militia, or warrior class of the country, and the leaders or protectors of the
people.2 " Originally, they seem to have been organized into ' Six
Hundreds,' and each six hundred seems to have had assigned to it the
protection of all the people in a Nad or country. The nad was in turn
split up into taras ... the tara was the Nayar territorial unit of
organization for civil purposes, and was governed by representatives of
the caste, who were styled Karanavar or elders. The six hundred was
probably composed exclusively of these elders, who were in some parts
called chief men or mediators. . . . There seem to have been four
families of them to each tara," — as there were four quarters to the Egyptian
nouit) the Stian village, and the oldest Babylonian cities.

We have already noticed the mention of " sixty houses" in an early
Babylonian inscription, and that of a " Chief of the Six Hundred of the
Country "in a later document. And it is doubtless an ancient tradition
which points in Malabar to " a period when a sixth share of the produce
was paid as a kind of protection fee to a constituted body of police." 3
The rule that demands the presence of six witnesses to the rarest and
most momentous of all contracts, the final sale, without option of redemp-
tion of landed property,4 is no doubt connected with the same set of
associations, and it is noticeable that in Egypt — where witnesses to the
sale of real property were still more numerous — the minimum number for
other contracts was still fixed at six. The 600 elders of course recall the
timuchi of Marseilles, who were of that number, which may be made up by
sixty multiplied by ten. There is a hint at the existence of this latter small
group in the proverb, " If you associate with one who has no friends, you
will lose all your nine friends, and at last yourself," 5 which seems to imply
that respectable members of the community had normally nine friends, form-
ing, with themselves, a " tithing " like that of the Chinese. Another pro-

1 Malabar^ i. p. 159; ii., Appendix, xi. p. ex. 2 /£., i. p. 131.

3 Wigram, p. xv. 4 /£., p. 54. 5 Malabar, vol. ii. p. 105.

548 FROM MASS A LI A TO MALABAR.

verbial Tamil expression, " We must do as ten people do," points in the
same direction. And the history of the epithet, " Son of ten fathers," J still
common as a term of abuse, may not be quite unconnected with the other
two phrases. The form of adoption " by ten hands " may be named from
analogy, but the "ten hands" only represent five persons.2

There are three special points of interest in the customs of Malabar.
The character of the political constitution, that of the domestic customs or
marriage law, and the system of land tenure ; while there are two elements
to be considered in the second branch of the subject, viz. the powers of
the eldest member of a family group to administer its joint property, and
the curious system of descent through women called Marumakattayam, or
" sister's son's inheritance."

It is impossible to understand the character of any one of these peculiar
traits without some knowledge of their history ; while if their history goes
back as far as has been suggested above, it cannot be traced with any cer-
tainty. All that the scope of the present work will admit is to bring
together the best description of each institution as seen to work by compe-
tent observers, giving precedence to the older European travellers, who had
the advantage of writing before European influence had exercised any
modifying effect on the customs they describe.

An East India Company linguist in 1746 writes : " These Nayars being
heads of the Calicut people, resemble the parliament and do not obey the
king's dictates in all things, but chastise his ministers when they do un-
warrantable acts." Thus, from the earliest times, says Mr. Logan, " down
to the 1 8th century, the Nayar tara and Nad organization kept the country
from tyranny and oppression, and so secured the prosperity of the Malayali
people and the importance of Calicut as an emporium for trade between
east and west." An Arab writer in the middle of the i5th cent. A.D.
wrote of Calicut in terms such as we shall find habitually applied to China :
"Such security and justice reign in that city that rich merchants bring to
it from maritime countries large cargoes of merchandise, which they deposit
in the streets and market places," and leave it without further guard than
the customs officers, who take a duty of 2\ per cent, if it is sold, "other-
wise they offer no kind of interference." 3 The same author records two
other noteworthy traits, "that vessels shipwrecked on the coast of this
country are not confiscated," and that " no one becomes king by force
of arms ; " while the native history, the Keralolpatti, or " Origins of
Kerala," preserves a variety of legends concerning the security and justice
to which the resort of merchants to Calicut was due.

Visscher's Letters from Malabar 4 describe the working of the quasi-
parliamentary or constitutional checks upon the arbitrary power of the
Rajahs. The general assemblies of the nation — which are, however, but

1 Wigram, Commentary, p. iii. 2 /#., p. 4.

3 Sir H. Elliot, Hist, of India, iv. p. 98.

4 Written in the first half of the 1 8th cent., and translated by H. Drury (Hakluyt
Sec.), p. 76.

MALABAR. 549

seldom held— are of two kinds. In those summoned by the Rajah
the Nairs keep guard round the Assembly, and "propositions are
discussed and measures rejected or adopted by unanimous silence or
clamour. But in affairs of minor importance, not affecting the welfare of
the whole community, the chiefs of the nation are alone summoned and
decide the question," i.e. the senate or elders decide matters of minor
importance, while others are submitted to the general Assembly, who, like
the Spartan Assembly, accept or reject, but apparently do not initiate
propositions.

" The assemblies collected by the will of the nation are conducted in
much the same manner, but with more impetuosity. These are never
held except in cases of emergency, when the rajah is guilty of extreme
tyranny or gross violence of the law. Then all the landed proprietors
are bidden to attend, and any one who dared refuse to obey the summons
would be subjected by the assembly to the devastation of his gardens,
houses, estates, tanks, etc. . . . The rajah has no right to attempt
to put these assemblies down by force of arms, and besides, so many
thousands flock to them that he would find difficulty in doing so if he
tried."

In complete harmony with this, in 1804, Lord Wm. Bentinck wrote that
all authorities were agreed on one point respecting the inhabitants of
Malabar, and that was with regard to " the independence of mind " of the
inhabitants ; they are also " extremely sensible of good treatment and im-
patient of oppression," have a high respect for courts of judicature, and
are " extremely attached to their customs." l To this we may add that, so
long as their customs and customary liberties are respected, they are in-
different to the person or nationality of their nominal sovereign, and they
will not fight for political independence so long as they are secured against
social molestation.2

What may be called the Lycian or Lydian side of the Nair institutions
is forcibly described by Barbosa, but it must be remembered that the
state of things he witnessed in the sixteenth century co-existed with the
same family system as that which still prevails, and is compatible with virtual
monogamy. After describing the fair complexion of the kings of Malabar
— "brown, almost white" — he says: "They do not marry nor have a
marriage law, only each one has a mistress, a lady of great lineage and
family, which is called Nayre, and said to be very beautiful and graceful.
Each one keeps such a one with him, near the palaces in a separate house,
and gives her a certain sum each year or each month for expenses, and
leaves her whenever she causes him discontent and takes another. And
many of them for honours sake do not change them, nor make exchanges
with them. . . . The children born of these mistresses are not held

1 Malabar, i. p. 217.

2 Tamil villagers have a proverb : " What does it matter to us whether Rama ad-
ministers the country or the Rakshasas," which explains sufficiently their acquiescence
in the English Raj. (Life in an Indian Village, by T. Ramakrishna, p. 95-)

550 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

to be sons, and do not inherit except the property of their mother, but the
king sometimes makes grants of money to them for them to maintain
themselves better than the other nobles. ... In this wise the lineage
of the kings of this country and the true stock is in the women. .
The king's sisters, whose sons succeed him (after his brothers) do not
marry, nor have fixed husbands, and are very free and at liberty in doing
what they please with themselves." l

This liberty no doubt included the right of being constant when they
pleased, as well as of exercising the kind of liberality attributed by Strabo
and Herodotus to the Armenian and the Lydian women.2 But it is pro-
bable that at all times, as now, the combined influence of natural affection
and proprietary interests tended to make virtual monogamy commoner
than was understood by travellers, who were shocked at learning that
marriage, in the sense of an obligatory bond, did not exist. Constancy
would sometimes be secured by the inclination of the woman, and some-
times by the interest of the man. Property coming to a woman from
different husbands was divided equally among her children,3 and therefore
any father who wished his own children to inherit, had an interest in re-
taining his wife's affections for their sake, as in other cases for his own.

Barbosa's account of the provision made for the king's children has
been mentioned already, and contemporary observations in Malabar help
to explain why the consolidation of political authority should have been
particularly difficult or impossible in communities starting with such a law
of inheritance. Mr. Logan writes of " a very powerful influence which
was, and I may say still is, always at work tending to the disintegration of
Malayali families and Malayali inheritances. A Malayali king's natural
heirs were his sisters', aunts', or female cousins' children. His own chil-
dren were the heirs, not of their father, but of their mother. But from
natural affection a suitable provision would always be made for the mother
of the king's children and her offspring, and this provision often took the
form of a grant of territory." Similarly it was observed at the beginning
of the last century that the Rajahs were generally poor at their accession,
because their predecessors were careful to distribute all their property
before death among their nearest relations, to the exclusion of the heir.

There was thus a double influence at work in favour of the equalization
of property, and against the concentration of power. Authority was
bequeathed by those who did not exercise and could not increase it, and
those who did exercise it had the strongest motives for doing so to the
advantage of others than their legal successors. With regard to Egypt, it
is only a matter of inference that the system of inheritance was adverse
to the establishment of a hereditary aristocracy, just as it is only an in-
ference that the object of Egyptian husbands, in giving all their property
to their wives, was to secure its transmission to their children. But the

1 A Description of the Coast of East Africa and Malabar, p. 105.

2 Ante, p. 457.

3 Rev. S. Mateer, Native Life in Travancore (1883), p. 173.

MALABAR. 551

inference in both cases gathers strength from the fact that the actual se-
quence of events in Malabar is exactly like that supposed to have occurred
in Egypt, where the record is fragmentary.

The Nair law of marriage and inheritance, though eccentric, is not
difficult to understand up to a certain point. Polyandry, in which the
Nairs used to resemble the Nabataeans, is declining, not to say obsolete.1
Girls are free to choose their own husbands, and a marriage is effected
when the man gives and the girl receives a piece of cloth in the presence
of her relations. If they wish to separate, the woman returns the cloth.

This " giving cloth," which most of our authorities seem to regard as
such a peculiarly inadequate marriage rite, goes back to the time when
cloth was comparatively rare, clothing by no means a matter of course,
and therefore the undertaking to provide a woman with the essential
articles of personal attire, permanently or till further notice, both repre-
sented and symbolized the acceptance of a peculiar responsibility towards
her. This was clearly the case in the days of Ptah-hotep, and the sur-
vival of special allowances for this purpose at Marseilles and Gortyn, long
after Greek influence had modified the ancient custom on most other
points, tends to show that there was still a traditional feeling about such
gifts being essential to a legitimate union. A woman was not married
unless her consort contributed, in fixed customary ways, to her support,
just as subsequently it was essential to any respectable marriage for the
woman to have brought a dowry.

In Malabar, we are told, " women are generally supplied by their hus-
bands with new cloths at the Onam festival about September, and at
Bharani in March. ... If the customary presents be not given on
those days sometimes the women of the Sudra . . . and other con-
cubinage castes, will forsake their man and go with others."2 But if the
institution has the affinities above suggested for it, the use of such dis-
paraging terms is uncalled for, and it should rather be said that the mar-
riage contract is broken when the husband ceases to make the customary
allowance to his wife, and she then becomes free to marry again.

The form, or informality, of Nair marriages has nothing to do with the
position of the father and mother in the family, and the mode adopted of
tracing descent and bequeathing property. " The husband," we are told,
" occupies no recognised legal relation involving rights or responsibilities in
regard either to his wife or his children," not because he is unknown or his
identity doubtful, for even if several brothers had the same wife, the chil-
dren would be readily attributed to the eldest, but simply because this
particular stock started with the idea that families were derived from the
mother, or remoter female ancestress. The description which follows is
taken almost verbatim from Mr. Logan's valuable work.3

1 The marriage tie, according to Mr. Wigram (loc. cti., p. iii.) is nowhere "more
rigidly observed or respected than it is in Malabar ; nowhere is it more jealously guarded
or its neglect more savagely avenged." Cf. S. Menon, Hist, of Travancore, p. 77.

2 Rev. J. Abb, Twenty-two years in Travancore, p. 200. " 3 Vol. i. p. 152 ff.

552 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

A Malayali taravad or tarwad corresponds pretty closely to what the
Romans called a gens, except that, in Malabar, the members of a tarwad
trace their descent in the female line only, from a common ancestress.
All tarwads of influence set apart property for the common use, and in an
Arab description of the peculiar marriage customs of the Nairs in the
sixteenth century, it is stated that the object of not allowing the children
to inherit their father's estates was to prevent the alienation of the family
property. So long as this common property exists, any number of families
may hang together and form one tarwad. But the conception of what
constitutes a family is peculiar ; if we suppose A to be a common
ancestress with three sons, X, Y, and Z, and three daughters, A, B, and
C; X, Y, and Z, are members of A's tarwad, just as the sons of a
Nabataean mother owning a tomb are entitled to be buried therein, but
their children never come into the tarwad (or tomb), nor stand in any
recognised legal relation to either their father or the property of their
father's tarwad. But the daughters and their families and descendants in
the female line may belong to A's tarwad till it is broken up and its
property divided.

The highest classes pride themselves on maintaining a large common
stock and hold together as long as possible, but even among them the
tarwad gets split up into subordinate divisions known as tavalis, or
branches, answering to the branch families founded by younger sons in
China. One way in which this occurs is that a member of the tarwad,
with, perhaps, some assistance obtained from his father (who, as already
said, stands in no legal relation to his son), sets up housekeeping on his
own account apart, taking with him one or more female relatives, usually
a sister or sisters, and thus forming a separate branch of the tarwad. In
a case like this a sister might be " lady of the house " in the Egyptian
sense, even though the brother had married somebody else, and there can
be little doubt that the peculiar role of the sister in Egypt was dictated
by primitive custom of the Nabatsean and Malayali type. If an heir is
wanted, a sister must be adopted to give birth to one.

A still more usual way of founding a new tavali, is for a female of the
tarwad to leave the tarwad house to live with the husband of her choice,
in a separate dwelling, prepared on purpose for her by her husband.
This house is usually conveyed to her in free gift, and there she settles
down to rear her family which constitutes a branch of her tarwad. It has
not occurred to these conservatives that any one save a mater familias can
be a householder. The property acquired by such a tavali has been
usually regarded as the separate property of its members, and not as part
of the common stock of the tarwad, but the English courts have latterly
tended to treat all property as common unless a formal division by deed
has taken place. A man's acquisitions during his own lifetime therefore
descend at his death to his tarwad, and not to his own children. But

"Now that a Nayar usually marries one wife, lives apart with her in their own
house, and rears her children as his own also, his natural affection comes into play, and

MALABAR. 553

there is a strong and most laudable desire for some legal mode, other than those at
present recognised, for conveying to his children and their mother all his self-acquired
property. At present he can only convey to them his property by stripping himself of it, and
making it over to them in free gift during his ozun lifetime. And this he is naturally
reluctant to do for many and obvious reasons. He is in a thoroughly false position, for
if he obeys his natural instincts and gives his property away in his lifetime to his wife
and children, he becomes a beggar, and is taken to task by his lawful heirs ; whereas, if
he hesitate to do it, he incurs the displeasure of his own household," x

— and of course, more especially of his sons, since his daughters will in-
herit a share in the house and whatever else their mother has to leave.

We see here in actual operation the motives attributed hypothetically
to the Egyptian husband and father, to explain, on the one hand, the
marriage settlements in which the husband despoils himself of everything
for his wife's endowment, and, on the other, the practice of unions
between brother and sister. There does not seem to have been any
tyrannous organization, like the tarwad, in historical Egypt, forcing the
property of the father away from his sons to his nephews, as feudal law
forced the property of the father away from his daughters. But it is
possible that, by ancient custom, property passed to the daughters, unless
the custom was barred by positive contract in the interest of all the
children, with the first-born as their representative. This would account
for the frequency of inheritances derived from the maternal grandfather ;
for it is evident that customs so little to the advantage of the real pater
familias could only have been acquiesced in for so many ages, if they were
found in practice compatible with the free use of the household property
'by its joint chiefs.

In Malabar, the property of the ancestress is supposed to pass to her
daughters' sons instead of her sons' sons, but in fact, the former class of
grandsons inherit no more than the life interest enjoyed by the sons them-
selves. And so in Egypt the husband of an heiress, though nominally
passed over, probably exercised just the same degree of control over the
joint estate as the son whose right derived from his mother. The habit
of dividing the inheritance in each generation grew up naturally in Egypt,
where it was usual for the natural family to live together, while in Malabar,
as in China, the association of several generations of cousins with a joint
interest made it imperative at least to keep out relations by marriage.

When family life and family affection were as fully developed as in
Egypt, it became impossible to retain any non-natural method of dividing
the parents' property between the children, such as would occur con-
stantly if men could only inherit from their mothers or bequeath property
to their daughters. The intense conservatism and practical considerate-
ness of the Egyptians, made them acquiesce for ages in the device which
the Malayali are beginning to find irksome, especially as their sense of its
real inconveniences is quickened by the contrasts it affords to English,
Mahomedan, and Brahminical law.

Of course there are two sides to the anomaly, and the husband who has
a grievance because he has no power over his own children, may mean-
1 For legislative proposals in relief of this grievance, see App. G.

554 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

while be acting as maternal uncle, or head to the families of other men.
Mr. Abbs quotes the case of a Nair who cried at his nephew's, not at
his wife's death ; the latter he could easily replace, but the loss of the
former might cause the family property to fall into neglect. The man in
this case lived in his own family house with the nephews, so that there
was the "companionship of the cupboard " to justify the preference felt
for them. A native writer on the law of inheritance says of the Iluvars,
a caste of Cingalese origin : " If one marries and gives cloth to an Ilavatti
female and has issue, one-tenth of their joint earnings is regarded as the
fruit of the husband's labours, and of the rest, half goes to the woman
and her children and half to the husband and his heirs."

Some of the inferior castes, who are supposed to be derived from the
indigenous population, follow the system of sisters' son's inheritance, com-
plicated by exogamy ; that is, they are divided into illams^ or houses,
members of which do not intermarry.

And the general rule forbids all marriage with relations on the mother's
side. Even a FAiropean education does not at once induce the natives to
renounce their ancestral modes of thought. Mr. Shungoony Menon, a
Nair gentleman, and the author of an English History of Travancore,
defends this system on the ground that " The reckoning of blood relation-
ship through the mother is more natural than through the male parent ;
the latter is rather by a legal rule. Among animals the mother alone
cares for the progeny. Amongst men we find by experience that
commonly the mother has more affection for the children, the father a
little less."

Ancestral property, and that acquired by a man before marriage, goes to
his tarwad, and of that earned during marriage, half is commonly given to
the wife and her children, and half to his sister's children. Marriages be-
tween a rich woman and a poor man seem to have been arranged upon terms
closely resembling the Egyptian marriage contract, in which the husband
receives a dowry, except that there is no penalty or compensation provided
in case of divorce. A respectable poor man described to a missionary
how he was engaged by two rich men of his own caste to be their sister's
husband. " As they did not wish to give me a dowry, or to let their sister
leave them, it was agreed that I should have a monthly allowance, go
whenever I pleased to see my wife, and, when at the house of her brothers,
eat in common with the males of the family," 1 who, it thus appears, ate
apart. He was disappointed to find this arrangement did not last, and
was told by the brothers that another husband had been chosen. They
took his two children to bring up as heirs to the family property.

Mr. Mateer describes the Malayalam Brahman system as "primogeniture
run mad," and in a long list of customs, mostly trivial, regarded as peculiar
to the Brahmins of Malabar, we find the following : "The eldest son alone
is entitled to legal marriage." Barbosa's account, which, as the earliest, is

1 Twenty-two Years in Travancore^ Rev. J. Abbs, p. 181.

MALABAR. 555

always to be preferred, says that : "They marry only once, and only the
eldest brother has to be married, and of him is made a head of the family,
like a sole heir by entail, and all the others remain bachelors and never
marry. The eldest is heir of all the property." A native writer, quoted
by Mateer,1 describes these domestic arrangements as follows : " The
younger brothers are to remain unmarried, to aid the increase of the
family estate as much as possible, and to honour and obey the elder
like a father. The eldest alone has authority over the family and the
property ; the younger ones have merely daily subsistence (for which they
have a right to sue), and the property can never be divided. But if the
family be numerous, and one brother wishes to separate and live apart,
the elder brother should give him a share sufficient for food and clothing,
or may make a regular allowance for this." These so-called Brahmins, who
have all the Brahminical virtues and are considered as peculiarly pure
and holy, are probably not Brahmins at all. Their proper name is
Nambutiri or Namboori, and at the present time only the eldest son is
allowed to marry in his own caste, though younger sons are allowed to
form connections, which entail no proprietary consequences, with Nair
women.2

The mother governs the whole household, frequently consisting of
twenty to thirty persons, settles all disputes, and rules over her grown-up
sons, who do not sit in her presence in public ; and all the Malayali chiefs'
houses are still, theoretically at least, subject to the eldest lady in each.3
The state of things in Malabar is thus one which would amply justify a
traveller's tale of a land where women exercise authority over men, and
the remarks of this kind made by credible writers of antiquity, whether
respecting Sparta or Lycia, the Egyptians or the Amazons, may be taken
as referring certainly to communities of the same kind.

The point, which mere observation from outside fails to clear up, is : In
what sense property can be said to pass to sisters' sons in communities
in which family property is held jointly? The Malayali — at least under
English rule— are litigious, and the chief character in their lawsuits is the
Karnavan. And it is possible that if we knew the past history of this
personage for the last four thousand years, we might find in it the key to
all the idiosyncrasies of Egyptian marriage law. His present position is,
any way, an essential feature in Malayalam law and custom.

The Karnavan is simply the senior member of the Malabar family com-
munity, the administrator of the family property, and the natural guardian
of every member within the family group. His status has been the subject
of much discussion in the English courts ; he is not a trustee, because he
has " an almost absolute control over the distribution of the family income
and the family expenditure," 4 and he may do anything — except sell the

1 Native Life in Travancore, p. 1 70.

2 Cf. Barbosa, p. 12 1.

3 Abbs, loc. at., p. 210. Logan's Malabar, i. p. 247.

4 Wigram, Commentary, p. 17.

556 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

family land — which a private owner can do, provided his acts are done
.bonafidevn behalf of the family, and not for his own personal advantage
at its expense. .

Practically, at the present time, these powers are exercised by the senior
male of the tarwad, though there are some Sudra families in which the
management is vested in the senior female ; this is especially the case
with the KovilaganiS) or princely houses, in which the primitive custom is
likely to be best preserved. The property is vested in the Karnavan for
the common good of all, and is indivisible. The rights of the junior
members are to succeed to the headship by seniority and to be supported
in the family house. The senior Anandravan, at least, must be consulted
to legalize the sale of family land, though, apparently, such an act may
be sanctioned after the event, if it is proved to have been necessary for
the family welfare. Members of the family thus, as Mr. J. D. Mayne
expresses it/ " have rights out of the property " rather than " rights to the
property. "

English judgments recognise expressly the double claims of seniority
and female descent. " In the Karnavan is vested actually, though in
theory in the females, all the property, movable and immovable, belonging
to the Tarwad." 2 And again, " The legal right to the family property is
vested in the female members of the family jointly, but for little other
practical purpose than regulating the course of succession." 3 The history
of this apparent halting between two opinions is probably to be found,
as Mr. Wigram suggests, in the gradual substitution of the Tarwad for
the Tara — of the family for the village group. Traces still remain of the
periodical redistribution of land and the custom of cultivating fields in
rotation. And the system of " Common cultivation of the fields," of
which the memory was cherished in Chinese classical tradition, combines
easily enough with a rule of descent which makes membership of the
village group depend upon the mother. At the present time ' persons
claiming membership in a Tarwad, in which they were not residing, must
prove that they were descendants of the mother, grandmother, or great-
great-grandmother of some of the existing members." 4

The Tarwad is a larger group, less closely related than the Basque family,
but the Karnavan holds in it exactly the position that the seigneur occupies
in the latter, though he succeeds to it by a more archaic 5 and, as we think,
less natural title. At the same time the similarity between the actual
position of the Basque junior (esterlo), and that of the younger sons of the
Nambutiri Brahmins may be taken to show that the Nayar and Nambutiri
customs are really only variations upon the same archaic theme. And,
after contemplating all these developments of the two leading ideas —
seniority and female descent — the conviction grows upon us that the

1 Hindu Law, § 264. Anandravan (pi. Anandravar) means "next relation," successor
or heir. 2 Commentary, p. 22. 3 Ib., p. 34. 4 Ib., p. 10.

5 The passage in Strabo (xvi. iv. 3), on the rule of succession in S. Arabia, may
be a distorted account of a similar succession by simple seniority.

MALABAR.

557

historic family must have started from a similar origin. If so, the impor-
tant place assigned to the eldest son, in the religious texts and domestic
customs of Egypt and Babylonia, must date from a prehistoric innovation :
the constitution of the natural family with the eldest son (or child), as
Karnavan — or managing director — in the place of a communistic village,
governed by the elder sons of women of chosen birth.

The difference between Basque and Malabar custom as we know them is
that the Basque head of the family community is (or was) urged by custom
and natural feeling to make the interest of the family his or her chief con-
cern. Heirs and heiresses scorn delights and lead laborious days in the
never-ending task of portioning cadets out of savings which shall leave the
family capital unimpaired, to serve the same purpose for future generations.
The Malabar Karnavan, selected by the mere accident of survivorship, is an
old man, whose wife and children have absolutely no interest in the fidelity
with which he discharges his trust. On the contrary, his easiest way of en-
riching his own natural family is to defraud the family community of which
he is the legal head. In the one case, the evils of a somewhat arbitrary
privilege are minimized, by the necessity for unselfish effort, which circum-
stances impose upon the seigneur. In the other, the senior member of the
family has no inducement, except the force of custom and public opinion,
to discharge the duties of a purely artificial post.

The comparison of the situations has a more than speculative interest,
because there is a demand for some sort of marriage law reform in Mala-
bar, which shall enable fathers to enrich their children by lawful bequests,
instead of fraudulent donations. And the failure of the Ptolemaic legis-
lation in Egypt warns us that it is only possible to alter ancient custom
for the better by adhering to its own natural line of development. The
proof that the Basque family represents a higher stage of development
of the Malabar family community is furnished, curiously enough, by Tibe-
tan custom, which retains some of the features peculiar to the Basques,
along with others even more archaic than the usage of modern Malabar.

"The custom of polyandry," writes a recent traveller,1 "is intimately
connected with the law of entail which prevails in Ladak. This ancient
Tibetan civilization has developed a system of land tenure almost as
complicated as our own, and which is admirably adapted to maintain the
prosperity of the cultivator, despite the natural poverty of the country.

" The first curious point to notice in this system is that the eldest
married son of a family is placed in a better position than his own father,
and is practically the head of the family. For as soon as the eldest son
marries, he enters into the possession of the family estate, a small portion
only being retained by his parents for the support of themselves and their
unmarried daughters ; and that portion also becomes the property of the
eldest son on the death of the parents and marriage of the daughters. But
the eldest son, when thus marrying and taking possession of the family

1 E. F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 138 ff.

558 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

estate, is obliged to support the two sons next to himself in age ; and these
two are not allowed to contract independent marriages, but share the wife
of their eldest brother, becoming the minor husbands of that lady.1 The
children of this strange union recognise all three husbands as father, but
pay more respect to the. eldest as head of the family. If there are more
brothers than two, the others do not share the family wife, but have to
leave the estate and seek their fortunes ouside, becoming lamas, or earning
their living by working as coolies, or, if they be fortunate, as magpas ; and
what the profession ofmagpa is, I shall presently explain.

"The two younger brothers, though minor husbands to the wife, are
always in an inferior position, and are often little better than servants to
the elder brother. ... If there be no son, the eldest daughter in-
herits the land. . . . The happy heiress of Ladak does not, unless
she wish it, marry an eldest son and his two younger brothers with him
according to the system I have just described ; but if she prefers it — and
she generally does prefer it — she enters into another kind of marriage con-
tract, with one man at a time : a contract which, so far as she is concerned,
binds with no strong ties, but which is recognised as being quite respect-
able, and for which the lamas have arranged a special religious ceremony.
The lady selects some — according to Tibetan standard — well-favoured
younger brother of a large family, who, therefore, has no interest in the
lands of his family, or share in his eldest brother's wife, and she makes
this person her magpa, as this sort of husband is called. The magpa hus-
band of an heiress has to behave himself if he wishes to retain his position.
He is the property of his wife, and cannot leave her, except in the case of
gross misconduct on her part. But if she is displeased with him, she can
turn him out of doors, and be rid of him, without any excuse or form of
divorce. Ramsey says she generally gives him a sheep or a few rupees
when thus discharging him. She is then quite free to take unto herself
another magpa."2

The succession of the eldest son to the position of head of the family on
his marriage is almost as peculiar to Basque custom as the companion in-
stitution of the heiress-ship of eldest daughters. This heiress-ship has to
be recognised in Tibet, where the marriage system tends to reduce the
number of children, in order to prevent the constant extinction of families.
And the Ladak magpa explains the origin of that most singular and service-
able of the Basque customs, — the rule by which heiresses and heirs are
required to espouse the younger children of other households. In Tibet
the only families likely to be rich in younger sons would be those in which
practical monogamy prevailed, so that the Basque rule would serve in every
way to counteract the ill effects of the national usage. And the traditions
of some kind of communism among the Iberians make it reasonable to
suppose the family law of the modern Basques to have started from the

1 The Spartan lots were supposed to suffice for the maintenance of three men at the
Syssitia (ante, p. 484), but this may be only an accidental parallel.

a For an exact parallel to Nabatrean custom (Strabo, xvi. iv. 25), cf. ib., p. 150.

MALABAR. 559

same point as that of Malabar and Tibet ; though it has gradually dropped
the archaic features which were inconsistent with monogamy, while retain-
ing all those conducive to a disinterested devotion among all members of
the family to its joint and common interests.

While Malabar and Ladak illustrate the evolution of Egyptian and
Basque family life, the Thesawaleme 1 of Ceylon throws some light on the
enigmatic fragments of Greek and Syrian law, which it has been proposed
above to regard as the remains of a similar body of custom at an advanced
stage of disintegration. These " laws and customs of the Malabars of
Jaffna" were collected for the Dutch Government in 1707 by a certain
Claas Isaaksz, " after an experience of thirty-five years, having been for
the most part of that time amongst the natives." And they show the line
which primitive Malabar usage tends to take when the natural family is
allowed to supersede the tarwad, without there having been any other
material change in the traditional conception of the relation of the two
parents respectively to the children of a marriage.

"Hereditary property," or that brought by the husband, "dowry," or
that brought by the wife, and what is acquired during marriage, are sharply
distinguished. And on the death of the father the " hereditary property "
is divided, exclusively, among the sons.2 Originally the daughters received
their dowries out of the dowry of their mother, and sons and daughters
both shared in the " acquisitions " of their parents, the daughters, how-
ever, having the larger portion. When the law-book was compiled, this
distinction was no longer rigorously observed, and dowries were paid from
all three sources indifferently. A bride's dowry was frequently increased by
special gifts from near relations on either side, but it might be said here,
as in East Africa, that the father is not bound to give anything to his
daughter, though he may do so, as a token of affection, if he pleases.

Unmarried sons bring all their earnings into the family purse (with the
quaint exception of the personal ornaments actually worn by them), but
they may retain for themselves, on their marriage, presents made to them
as bachelors : a provision which clearly points to a state of things similar
to that contemplated in the Syro-Roman law-book.3 In Ceylon it is laid
down that a childless couple may not make presents to nephews or nieces
" without the consent of the mutual relations ; " and if such consent is
given, still, in default of donee's heirs, such gifts return to the heirs of the
donor. The numerous provisions respecting second marriages help to ex-
plain the principles upon which the respective properties of the parents are
divided among the children. " When husband and wife live separately on

1 J. D. Mayne. Hindu Law, p. 37. The Tesawalamai, reprinted from the translation
of H. F. Muttu Khrishna, 1891.

2 One is tempted to ask whether the Laws of Justinian concerning Armenian succession
(Ed. iii. and Novell, xxi.) can have been directed against some similar usage among the
original men of Van. Daughters, it was decreed, should share with sons even xw/u'a
XeveapxiKa (Etudes d'histoire die droit, R. Dareste, p. 121); and if sons only had done
so by native usage, it may have been because the " hereditary property " was limited, as
in Ceylon, and the daughters provided for more liberally in other ways.

8 Ante, p. 488.

560 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

account of some difference, it is generally seen that the children take the
part of the mother and remain with her." In case of such disagreement,
the husband is not allowed to alienate any part of the wife's dowry, though,
while they are good friends, he is not forbidden to alienate " some part,"
i.e. probably a reasonable amount for some sufficient cause. In the same
way the husband, it is said, may give away one-tenth of his hereditary pro-
perty without the consent of his wife and children, but not more. The
precise fraction doubtless represents the limit which public opinion thought
fit to set to the discretion of persons who might occasionally be tempted to
prefer their own wishes to the family wants, but the restriction shows joint
ownership of the Egyptian type to have been the rule.

If the father dies leaving young children, the mother retains all the pro-
perty, but must dower the daughters when marriageable. The sons have
no claim till the mother's death. If the mother marries again, she must
dower the daughters of both marriages herself out of her own dowry ; and
the sons of the first marriage can claim their father's hereditary property and
so much of his share of the acquisitions as has not been spent on their own
sister's dowry. On the death of the mother, the sons of both marriages
divide her share of the acquired property left at the close of the first
marriage ; and if it has diminished in amount during the second marriage,
the second husband must make good the deficiency. The sons of the
second marriage similarly inherit from their father's hereditary and acquired
property.

If the mother dies first, the father retains the whole estate while single,
having the same duties as a mother towards the children, for this is a com-
munity in which, as at Ephesus, parents " owe dowries to their daughters."
If he marries again, he gives up, for the benefit of the children, the whole
of their mother's dowry and half the acquisitions of the marriage. The
sons either share or hold jointly what is left from this after dowering the
daughters, but they have no claim on their father's property till his death,
after which his hereditary property is halved between the sons of the two
families, who thus share per stirpes, not per capita. An unmarried sister
with married brothers may claim to have their parents' property divided ;
to which the brothers generally object, as her share is the larger, and they
are not her heirs. Brothers inherit from brothers, and sisters from sisters ;
that is to say, the shares of the sexes are regulated by the original number
of sons and daughters born, and the survivors of each sex divide its share.
If the unmarried sister remain with the brothers, living at their expense, they
retain everything on her death ; but anything given to her, as it were in lieu
of dowry, would pass to her sisters, and so out of " hereditary property."

If there are no children, the property of both husband and wife reverts
to their respective " belongings ; " and it is expressly stated that if the
childless husband has given part of the acquired property of the marriage
to his own family, his wife's family have a first claim against his estate for
a corresponding share on his death.

The difference between Ceylon and Malabar custom seems to be that

MALABAR. 561

the former gives men and women, as it were, a life-interest in their own
possessions, subject to certain indefeasible rights of daughters, but without
prejudice to the reversionary rights of, first sons, and then kinsmen in
general. In Malabar this life-interest is restricted to personal acquisitions,
and the difference is clearly due to the breaking up of family groups of the
tarwad sort into separate natural families, ruled and maintained by their
natural heads. The rights of the epiballontes, the kinsmen or " belong-
ings/' which are so much insisted on in the Gortyn code, can be under-
stood as a survival from a time when all family property was actually
enjoyed collectively by a family group ; but they are too strictly inter-
woven with ideas of close family relationship for them to be derived, by
any clearly conceivable process, from merely tribal rights or relationships.
And it will probably be admitted that no history of an institution can
be exact and complete which does not explain the fact of its existence
and the manner of its growth.

The cases in which disputes are mentioned as arising seem to indicate
a stronger feeling in favour of the claims of daughters than the strict rules
of custom enforced. For instance, parents were in the habit of settling so
much of their joint property on their daughters, that the fraction left to be
shared between them and the sons, on the parents' death, was so small
that the half-share of the sons was reduced to a trifle not worth having.
In other cases the sons were said to persuade their parents to divide the
property in their own lifetime, after which they would complain if the
parents mortgaged it for the benefit of married daughters. At this point,
again, we may imagine a point of contact between legal custom in Greece
and Ceylon. At Myconos * marriage settlements were registered because
they commonly took the form of charges on land ; that is to say, the
daughter's portion was secured by an antichretic mortgage, or sale with
power of redemption. Unless such transactions were registered, as well as
leases or sales upon other considerations, the publicity given (as we see
by the Tenos inscription) to dealings in real property would be incomplete
and delusive.

We gather that in Ceylon parents were rather in the habit of trying to
marry their daughters, as it were, above their means, by settling mortgaged
land as dowry ; and the law always regarded the dowry as a first charge.
It is said 2 that if husband and wife have mortgaged land or a garden
as security for a debt, without giving up possession, and then give the
land as dowry, without stating the fact of its being encumbered, the gift
holds good, and the creditor must recover from the general estate, the sons
being liable, up to their capacity, for such debts. There is, however, a
proverb,3 " Immediate possession must be taken of dowry and pawns," and
even a marriage settlement becomes void if the land ceded by it is not
taken possession of within ten years from the execution of the deed.

1 Recueil dts Inxr.Jur. Grecques, i. p.i6i.

2 Tesaiualmai, p. 26.

3 /*., p. 2.

P.C. O O

562 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

The practical connection between the law of marriage and inheritance
and the law of mortgages, which has received an extraordinary development
in Malabar, will be more readily understood when, the complications of
the latter have been described ; but there are one or two points of ancient
Babylonian usage, on which some light is thrown by our Ceylon code,
that may take precedence of the general question of Malayalam land
tenures. It will be remembered that in the early Babylonian deeds, one
of the commonest of the possessions given with a daughter in marriage
were slaves, one or more ; similarly in Ceylon, according to the observant
Mr. Isaaksz, the wealthy sometimes give "one of their slave-girls to a poor
widow, in order that she may get a husband for her daughter by giving the
slave-girl to her daughter, either as a gift or dowry." Slaves may be
pledged as well as land, animals, fruit-trees, and jewels, and hence such a
slave represents a small capital, apart from the value of her personal ser-
vices. Otherwise, the position of slaves, as established by law and custom,
was not such as to make their possession a source of much wealth.
A slave could not marry the slave of another master without his consent.
But if this consent was given, or if both parents belonged to one employer,
apparently it was a matter of course for the wife to have a dowry, and for
this and the acquisitions of the pair to pass to their children. If the
father and mother have different masters, the children belong to their
mother's master, who might allow them to retain their mother's property,
though they would not inherit from the father, who belongs to somebody
else.

It is exceedingly probable that in ancient Babylonia the slaves enjoyed
just the same kind and measure of liberty as the Thesawaleme describes.
Married slaves lived apart from their masters, earning their own living,
and paying a yearly cash tribute (of fourfcwams). They were also required
to fence their master's land (receiving maintenance while working for
him), and to perform any share of Government work imposed on him ;
while their boys were required to herd his cattle. On the other hand,
the employer had to make an allowance (of six fanauis] to the female
slave on the birtli of a child, to defray all attendant expenses. Land or
similar property belonging to slaves might be claimed by their master ; but
if they were sold without such claim being made, the first master's right
lapsed, and the new employer apparently had no more claim than a second
husband to the acquisitions of his predecessor. The property of childless
slaves goes to their brothers and sisters, if these belong to the same master;
otherwise each master takes the heir's share of that one of the married
couple who belonged to him. But the general recognition of the family
life and private property of the so-called slave is the strongest proof we
could have, considering the date of the compilation, -that the customs
recorded are absolutely uninfluenced by European ideas.

"Land or a garden" are mentioned together as the objects most likely
to be mortgaged, and the distinction probably corresponds roughly to the
Egyptian and Babylonian description of " property in town or country."

MALABAR. 563

Ibn Batuta, in a description of Malabar, which Mr. Logan declares
might have been written literally at the present day, says that everybody
has a garden, and his house placed in the middle of it, — after the manner
of the ancient Egyptians. Barbosa says the Nairs live on their estates,
which are fenced in, and to illustrate the respect shown for mothers and
elder sisters, who are treated as mothers, he explains, " they support them
with what they gain, because, besides their allowances, most of them
possess houses and palm trees and estates, and some houses let to peasants,
which have been granted by the king to them or their uncles, and which
remain their property."

Visscher was informed that the noble families " all subsist on the pro-
duce of their own estates, and carry on no trade with the exception of
bartering with one another." l The lands of these families, when not sub-
let, are cultivated by the inferior castes, the Helots of Malabar, who
are subject to some ignominious observances, but not to material ill-treat-
ment. The most numerous class, called Pulleahs, " are born slaves, but
have certain privileges granted to them, which secure their maintenance
so that none may perish by want. . . . They have the right of building
and planting, for which labour they receive settled wages. . . . When
the paddy is cut they receive the tenth part in payment, and a sort of
black paddy which springs up fourteen days afterwards is also their
perquisite." 2

The result of official inquiries and observations, summed up in the
" Standing Information " of the Madras Government, adds to these particu-
lars that "the country was originally subdivided between a race of Brahman
priests called Namboori and a military tribe called Nairs ; these two hold-
ing in subjection the agriculturalists of the country. . . The Nairs paid
no land tax, but attend the kings to the field with their retainers. The
Namboories also paid no land tax, but furnished the expenses for the
support of the temples." 3 In other words, as in Egypt, a priestly and a
military class appeared to divide the overlordship of as much of the
country as was not royal property, the token of such lordship being the
right to levy land tax instead of paying it. Where the rajah was sole lord
of the soil he received one-tenth of the fruits, elsewhere a smaller propor-
tion.4 At the same time, the primitive republican temper of the people
had not been subdued by the consolidation of a great national monarchy,
and so the military caste, instead of forming a royal army, constituted a
popular protectorate, approaching on one side to the " Guardian " class
imagined by Plato, and on the other to the police of the desert exercised
by the wild Towarek.

Another Egyptian-like trait is described by Barbosa: "The king of
Calicut keeps many clerks, as they write all the affairs of the king's
revenues, his alms and the pay which is given to all, and the complaints
which are presented to the kings, and, at the same time, the accounts of

1 Letters from Malabar, pp. 122, 123. 2 Loc. cit., p. 71.

8 Malabar, i. p. 288. 4 Visscher, Letters, p. 75.

564 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

the collection of taxes." 1 They are called menons, or scribes of the palace,
and write with an iron style upon the olas or leaves of cocoanut trees.
The rajah received 20 per cent, on debts discharged by his order, and
a fee on the execution or renewal of all deeds and contracts ; while fines
on the renewal of leases were levied on the accession of a new rajah.
Legal suits were tried according to old custom viva voce, and concluded
by a fiat of the rajah, who in obscure cases consults with his Brahmins.2
Oaths are taken in disputed cases.

The native historian already quoted describes the general policy of the
Chera kings as " peace at any price, and their policy and avocations as
. . . more of a commercial than of a warlike nature." And he records
an 1 8th century enactment, which seems to show that the rulers of the
country had the same sense of their duty to the multitudes as well-
conditioned Chinese and Babylonian princes. In 1776 it was enacted
that : " Strict attention shall be paid to the charitable supply of water
mixed with butter milk to the weary travellers on the road ; and the public
inns, where this water is supplied, shall be thatched and kept always clean.
Payment for butter milk for this purpose shall be made daily, and the pay of
the person employed in giving water shall be paid punctually every month."
The art of calculating the rising of the sun, moon and stars, and the
date of eclipses is included in primary education throughout Keralam.3

The astrologers, who are accounted a low but very important caste,
follow the marumakkatayam system of inheritance, and are probably of
non-Aryan race, and so repudiated by the Brahmins, though too strongly
entrenched by custom to be superseded. The principal feasts of the year
are connected with the Calendar. It is the custom for presents to be
brought to superiors at the vernal equinox ; the Dasara, a ten days' feast,
meant to coincide with the autumnal equinox, is also called "the opening
day and the closing day;" but without further information as to the history
of the term in Malabar, it would be rash to think of any connection with
the opening and closing of the books (recording the inundation) in the
valley of the Nile. The greatest national feast is that of the new moon
(August-September), and there can be no doubt as to the kinship of the
"feast of lamps" at the new moon in the month Tulam (October-
November), with the corresponding festivals in ancient Egypt and modern
China. A cycle of sixty years is in use for chronological purposes, and
deeds are dated in such a year of such a king " opposite " such another
year/4 counted from the date of his accession to the heirship of the Raj.

The customs of the different castes vary in minor particulars, but the
following description of a Dravidian village, by a native writer 5 contains
much that would be generally applicable, and will be a fitting introduction

1 P- 1 10. 2 visscfar, p. 67.

* Early History of Travancore, by T. Shungoony Menon, 1878, pp. 30, 279, 49.
4 Hultzsch, Indian Antiquary, Aug. 1891.

* T. Ramakrishna, I.e., pp. 3-121. The relation between the Tamil villagers and the
Xairs might be compared to that between the Laconian countrymen and the Spartans.

MALABAR. 565

to the study of village life in China. The village in question has a popula-
tion of about 300, with fifty or sixty houses; it was founded in the nth
cent. A.D., and contains ten families of Tulaval Vellalahs. The headman
of this caste owns some fifty acres ; has power of deciding petty civil cases
and punishing slight crimes by fines or the cangue. He collects the
revenues, reports births, deaths and rainfall to the Talookdar, the head of
the district subdivision, and must also provide provisions for officials visit-
ing the village.

The accountant is regarded as a scoundrel ex offido ; the policeman
watches the fields at night and convoys the taxes to the treasury. The
Brahmin Purohita is asked by villagers what day the new moon falls, and
when the anniversary of a husband's death should be celebrated, or when
such and such a feast comes ; when it is propitious to build, to buy
bullocks, or to bring a daughter-in-law home. He casts horoscopes and
performs ceremonies for the dead on the first, second, eighth, and sixteenth
days, besides monthly and yearly ceremonies. There are two other
Brahmins who do work in the temple ; l seven acres of land in the village
belong to it, of which they receive the fruits after providing for the lighting,
etc., of the temple, besides the daily offerings of rice, which of course they
consume themselves, and the offerings of fruit, nuts, etc., brought by
the worshippers, as well as money. Extra gifts are made on occasion of
festivals, when images are carried with flowers and jewels in procession.

The schoolmaster knows the Tamil version of the Mahabharata by
heart. Twenty or thirty boys are in school for ten hours daily, with four
monthly holidays, two at new and two at full moon. Four or five years
suffice to teach reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, which is all that is
aimed at. The vythian, or village doctor, knows a few medical treatises (in
verse) by heart, and recommends religious ceremonies along with his drugs.
The carpenter makes wooden ploughs, pestles, carts, and helps with the
woodwork of houses. The blacksmith makes axes, spades, sickles, etc.
The ideiyan^ or cowherd, is proverbially stupid. He milks the village cattle
morning and night, besides driving them to pasture and herding them all
day. The washerman collects the clothes the villagers want washed in the
morning and returns them at night, receiving from each a handful of food,
cooked rice at night, and flour with broken rice in the morning ; he also
makes torches, with old rags, for religious festivals or entertainments.

The potter is a very important personage, as jars are used to hold all
kinds of things. The potter acts as bone-setter, though other surgery is in
the hands of the barber. The Panisiva — " one who serves " — is an official
messenger who goes to carry invitations to distant relatives, and blows the
conch-shell at funerals. The village usurer and bazaar keeper (chetty)
rivals the accountant in ill-fame. The villagers have to pay their taxes to
the Government in money by monthly instalments; if one wants money for
this purpose, he borrows it from the money-lender, who charges no interest,

1 There are two dancing girls (Devadasis = servants of God) in the village. They act
as bridesmaids at Hindoo weddings and dance and sing on such occasions.

566 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

but requires to be repaid in grain at the harvesting season. At that time
(from January to March), the average price of grain is, say, 27 measures
for a rupee. This the money-lender stores in his granary till July, August,
and September, when the average price is 19 measures to a rupee, so that
he really clears 50 per cent, in six months.1

Two or three furlongs from the village is the parcherry of the pariahs;
about one hundred live here, and are the servants of the landowners of the
village. They are paid in grain at the rate of 48 measures of grain per
month = 4s. or 5^. They do all the agricultural work. In case of epidemics,
the Vellala headman comes to consult the aged pariah head. They work
for the same masters from father to son, marry when their masters do and
share their mourning. They are very industrious and hardworking ; the
hours of labour are from five to ten or eleven, and from three to six or
seven. They are scrupulously honest and veracious — so much so that they
will give truthful evidence in a law court against their own master — which
the writer evidently thinks the strongest possible test.

The Valluvars act as priests for the pariahs. Tiruvalluvar. the author of
the Rural, was a Valluvar. They " know a little astrology," and practise
medicine in a rude form. The peasants' year is divided into five months
of constant care and labour, ploughing, sowing, weeding, watering, and
watching to guard the crops against bird, beast, and man. This is from
July to December; the harvest lasts from January to March, and when
finished there is a period of rest before and through the summer heats.
Marriages are celebrated then, and juggling and theatrical entertainments
find ready patronage. For the latter 5,000 or 6,000 persons from several
villages round assemble ; the performers are paid a pagoda (*js.) per night,
but receive presents of all sorts besides, the leading villagers giving a
present, which is publicly announced ; $d. is a handsome contribution.
The Pongal feast is celebrated in January; the pongal, i.e. boiling of rice,
is dedicated to Indra one day and to the cattle the next. Presents are
made to sons-in-law and their wives at this feast.

Two other peculiar institutions, described at length in other parts of this
work, are met with in Malabar — the Chinese lottery loans or money clubs
and the antichretic mortgage, common to the Chinese with the ancient
Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Berbers, and the Basques. But before
dealing with these it will be convenient to mention the social idiosyn-
crasies of the Minicoy islanders, for which no parallel can be found
nearer than in ancient Egypt. There can be little doubt that this island
is the original of the " Island of women," mentioned by Hiouen-thsang,
Marco Polo, and some Mahomedan travellers, and till recently believed to
have only a mythical existence.

In 1876 a census of the island was taken by Mr. H. M. Winterbotham,
Assistant Collector of Malabar, which goes far to explain and indeed to

1 A Government that is at once simple-minded and benevolent of course estimates its
revenue in grain of the average price, and takes the payment in kind when its value to
the cultivator is lowest.

MALABAR. 567

justify the legend. To obtain the desired information, the headman of
the island issued orders to "certain women in authority, and they called
together an adult female from every house. About 400 females assembled,
and told off the numbers of their households with much readiness and
propriety : " 383 males, or one from nearly every household, were returned
as absent at sea at the time of the census. The islanders are bold seamen
and experienced boat-builders ; the men serve as pilots in the neighbour-
hood and to Arabia, and, like the islanders described by Marco Polo, " are
capital fishermen and catch a great quantity of fine large sea-fish, which
they dry for food and sale." Now, as then, the women gather the cocoa-
nuts, and " their husbands do furnish them with all necessaries."1

Marco describes the people as baptized Christians, but maintaining the
ordinances of the Old Testament — a misconception which may have been
due to their scrupulous cleanliness and their rules on the subject of purifi-
cation and the isolation of lepers. The streets are daily swept and the
village kept clean ; burial grounds for those who die of infectious diseases
are separate and remote. The people are strictly monogamous, though
they have long since been converted to Mahomedanism, and the women,
in spite of the number of spinsters among them, will not hear of the
abrogation of their law on this point. The local feeling is so strong that
the Amin, or governor of the island, did not venture to indulge his avowed
wish for a supplementary spouse. The women appear freely in public
with their heads uncovered, and according to Mr. Winterbotham, take the
lead in almost everything except navigation.2

Every woman in the island is dressed in silk, and every husband must
allow his wife at least one candy of rice, two silk gowns, and two under-
cloths a year. And besides this exact counterpart to the alimentary
pension of Egyptian wives, he also presents her on marriage with a fine
betel pouch and other personal belongings. Courtship is a necessary pre-
liminary to marriage, after which the wife remains in her mother's house,
while the husband, as already mentioned, is frequently away. If daughters
are numerous, they leave the parental roof in order of seniority, and the
houses erected for them become their property. The men, it is reiterated,
have no right of ownership over the houses — a fact which tempts us to
wonder whether the significance of the Egyptian wife's title as " lady of
the house," has been understood. The husband retains the power of
divorce, but inconstancy of any kind is rare.

The village is divided for purposes of administration into attiris (sea-
shore or male assemblies), and varangis^ or female assemblies ; the boys
remain under the women till the age of seven. There are ten varangis,
each under a headwoman, which corresponds with the hint at a system of
tithings given in the proverbs quoted above. Minicoy is nominally subject
to the Rajah of Cannanore, to whom, the islanders say, their ancestors
commended themselves on condition of his protecting them against

1 Ante, p. 455.

- Malabar, vol. ii. appendix ,\xi. Laccadive Js!iu:ds, p. 277 ff.

568 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

pirates; but their ''independence of mind" has shown itself in successful
resistance to the oppressive monopolies under which the neighbouring
islands suffer, and they only pay a reasonable tribute, collected in their
own way. They produce the best coir in the market, and devote them-
selves almost exclusively to the cultivation of cocoanuts. " So little has the
idea of property in the soil taken root that it is customary even now for a
man to plant a cocoanut tree in his neighbour's back yard if his neighbour
neglects this duty and if space is available ; " 1 but the trees are private
property and recognised by distinguishing marks, the evidence of which is
not contested.

Oaths are employed in settling petty civil disputes, and particular solemn-
ity is held to attach to those taken in the name of the Rajah and on the
Koran, who inherit perhaps the reverence felt 5,000 years before for the
king and the great gods in ancient Chaldasa. At the same time, the
English official who gives all these particulars notes that, as in modern China,
there is " no distinction between criminal offences and those constituted
by commercial and fiscal arrangements, and the same summary proceedings
were resorted to in all matters."2 The disposition of the islanders is de-
scribed as quiet and obliging ; they differ in dress and personal appearance,
as well as in manners and customs, from the adjoining islanders, being
much smaller in stature, darker in complexion, and with very round faces.
Photographs would easily reveal whether the approximation is towards the
red race of the Egyptian monuments, or to the Gudea type; but to judge
from institutions only, we should naturally conclude the islanders to have
the same origin as the Nairs of the mainland, only to have diverged less
from the primitive type, owing to their greater seclusion and immunity from
foreign admixture.

The Dravidian kiiri, or lottery, is said to have been handed down from
very ancient times, and it is still commonly resorted to by any one desiring
to raise a sum of money for some special purpose, such as a daughter's
marriage. The organizer of the lottery induces his friends to subscribe a
certain amount of money or rice, which they bring to his house. They
are there entertained, and draw lots to decide which of the guests shall
receive similar contributions next. On this occasion the organizer con-
tributes as well as the rest, and a feast is always given by the recipient of
the lump sum. This goes on till all have received their friends' con-
tributions, the only element of chance being as to the date of repayment.3
The feast seems an essential part of the business, and thus suggests that
the origin of the institution may really be found in the common meals and
common revenues of permanent societies, like the Cretan or Carthaginian
clubs.

The land tenures of Malabar are exceedingly curious and perplexing.
Agriculture is considered highly honourable, though the land does not
appear to be always or even generally owned by the cultivator. It was,

1 Logan, Malabar, vol. ii. p. 278. 2 /£., ii. p. 288.

3 //'., i. p. 172. ii. p. 172. Commentary ', chap. xi.

MALABAR. 569

however, truly said at the beginning of the present century that " the
division of the produce of the soil between the landlord and tenant was
perfectly denned and confirmed by immemorial usage." The perplexing
thing is that the landlord, or janmi, seems to have more the character of a
feudal overlord than of a proprietor exacting commercial rent, while at the
same time nearly all the recognised forms of tenancy seem derived from
some kind of mortgage. We have already met with the same difficulty in
Egypt, where the titular ownership of the land might remain vested in
persons who had entirely surrendered its use. Both in Egypt and Malabar,
the problem is to explain how it came about that the overlord, or political
superior, should mortgage instead of letting his land, and in some cases
mortgage it, as we should say to its full value, yet without forfeiting his
dominium, for whatever that was worth.

The meaning of Jenm or Janmam is given as (i) birth, birthright, heredi-
tary proprietorship, (2) freehold property, which it was considered disgrace-
ful to alienate.1 A military aristocracy apparently at some remote period
took possession of the country in the name of a certain number of family
communities. The portion of such families was the inalienable possession
of the hereditary group. They paid no rent or taxes, but held the land on
condition of rendering military services when required. They may have
originally cultivated their holdings by the labour of slaves or family depen-
dants,— as we imagine the hereditary lords of ancient Egypt to have done ;
or they may have employed the original inhabitants on the terms known as
Verumpattam, or "simple lease," by which "the tenant is in fact a labourer
on subsistence wages." 2 Mr. Logan interprets the word as the share of
the produce, varam^ belonging to the pad^ or man in authority ; i.e. that
right to levy land tax, which the Pharaohs conferred on soldiers and priests.

The whole of the estimated net produce, after cost of seed and cultiva-
tion, is payable to the landlord, but a "good old custom" gives the tenant
one-third of the net produce. This "good old custom" may be associated
with the fundamental ideas of the earliest agricultural stock. It is said
of the people of Jaffna, that when any person sows the fields of another
Avithout a previous agreement, "it is deemed sufficient if the sower pays to
the proprietor the taraivdram, winch signifies the ground duty, and is cal-
culated to be one-third of the profits, except the tenth part, which is given
to the proprietor previously." 3 Similarly, if a man plants palm trees on
another man's ground (with his consent), he gets two-thirds of the fruits,
provided he furnished the plants and the labour, the owner of the ground
receiving the remaining one-third ; but if the owner of the ground finds
the plants, the planter gets one-third and the owner two-thirds ; as in the
hypothetical agreement suggested to explain the rate of agricultural interest
in Egypt and Babylonia.4 .In Ceylon also, the debtor is not obliged to
pay as interest more than the amount borrowed.5

1 Commentary, p. 198. Cf. the Egyptian title, erpa, with similar sense.

2 //>.. p. 93. 3 L.c., p. 27.

4 Ante, pp. 334, 335. 5 Tesawalamai, p. 26.

570 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

According to Major Walker 1 the rent of any particular piece of
ground "is reckoned at the rate of two-thirds of the real produce to
the jenvikar (or owner of the jenm), and one-third to the patamkctr*
the person taking the lease or patam. "Suppose a piece of land in
a state of cultivation to be let that will receive ten paras of seed ; on
looking at the soil, the people who are appointed to judge this matter,,
estimate its produce at nine fold, or ninety paras. (The return for seed
was said to vary from three to thirty fold.) The quantity of seed sown,,
or ten paras, is first deducted ; a little less than a fourth part, or twenty
paras, is also deducted to defray the expense of cultivation. The remainder
of the gross produce, or sixty paras, will remain to be disposed of: this is
divided into three parts, two of which belong to the jenmkar, and one to
the patamkar." The two-thirds are called the patam or rent, but the
deduction of all working expenses from the divisible profits actually makes
the tenant's share of the produce come, in the case described, to five-ninths,.
or rather over one-half instead of one-third. So that the normal Malabar
lease, and the terms of lease which was assumed in Ceylon, failing express
stipulation to the contrary, seem to approach to the Babylonian agreement
respecting "a field of half."2 The supplementary tenth, which was to be
paid in advance, probably on each renewal of the lease, reminds us of the
payment "in the tenth year," vaguely alluded to in Babylonian deeds as
" according to the custom of the people." 3

Throughout Malabar land is still measured, as in the contract tablets of
Babylonia, by the quantity of seed required to sow it in order to produce a
given crop, so that the quality as well as the area of any plot is considered
in the price. The superficial area is given for purposes of identification,.
but the real standard of measurement is the amount of the normal grain
crop.

In Malabar every man with any pretensions to education is his own con-
veyancer, and there are a multiplicity of deeds, having each a clearly
defined scope, by which the owner of land may pledge one fraction of his
interest in it after another, while retaining his right to redeem at some
future time ; and land was seldom sold till the power of pledging it had
been exhausted. "There is even one last resource, short of selling the
land altogether, by which the landlord relinquishes the power to redeem,,
and has nothing left him but the nominal right of proprietorship,"4 — an
apparently barren value, which, to our perplexity, the Egyptians also-
treated as requiring a separate deed for its conveyance.

In some leases a year's rent is paid in advance, and must be refunded
on the determination of the lease. The tenant is in all cases entitled by
custom to compensation, on eviction, for the dwelling-house he may have
erected. The kanavi, which comes next in order to the simple lease, is a
deed by which the janrni makes over land in return for money or rice

1 P. 7. This Report, made in 1801 on Lard Tenures and Transfer in Malabar, was.
reprinted at Calicut in 1862, "for information," but is probably not generally accessible.

2 Ante, p. 336. s Anfe^ p> 3S4i. 4 Ma/afar, vol. ii. p. 184.

MALABAR. 571

deposited with him ; after which the mortgagee pays himself interest at the
rate of 3 or 5 per cent, on the loan, and gives the janmi the customary
share of the available residue. The custom on this point differed in
Northern and Southern Malabar. In the former Mr. Wigram believes that
the kanam was u really in its inception a usufructuary mortgage . . .
and the rent reserved was a nominal sum to show that the janmi had not
parted with his seignorial rights." l

In other words, the so-called rent was really in its origin a form of land
tax or tribute. A community in the habit of bartering the use of money
against that of land only begins to demand rent for the land, when the
latter has become the property of a politically dominant class. The poli-
tical superior in this case was of a liberal and kindly sort, and accordingly
the rent exacted was either nominal or a fair metayage, with virtual- fixity
of tenure. But the view already expressed as to the political origin of
agricultural rent is confirmed when we find the mere fact of political
superiority giving rise to a system of disguised leaseholds, among a people
to whom the idea of undisguised leases is apparently not merely unfamiliar
but unintelligible.

In the English courts it has always been a matter of controversy whether
a kanam should be treated as a lease or a mortgage. " Rent is payable in
the case of every kanam, but all kanams partake also to some extent of the
incidents of a usufructuary mortgage"3 ... a kanam is not wholly a
lease, "as the land enures as security, if not for the principal, at least for
the interest of the loan advanced." In Southern Malabar, where the kanam
was originally known as "land lease," and the j an mi's share amounted by
custom to half the proceeds, while fees were regularly charged on the re-
newal of the lease every twelve years, though the form of a mortgage was
retained, the effect was really that the tenant paid a lump sum for the right
of occupancy, which served virtually as security for the payment of his rent.

Kanam, a term generally supposed to mean mortgage or pledge, is said
to be only applicable to land, timber, trees, or slaves, i.e. the real property
of the country. The legal vocabulary is extraordinarily copious. There
is a deed called kotuppanayam^ or " ploughshare pledge," which answers
exactly to the Babylonian exchange of rent for interest; under this tenure
the mortgagee has the right to cultivate the land, but the owner or landlord
is free to payoff the loan when he pleases. Undamti Panayam — so-called
because it extinguishes itself — is " a settlement of the debt by the enjoy-
ment of the profits for a specified term, answering to the vivum vadium,
where the mortgagee holds the estate till the rent and profits repay the
sum borrowed." Otti is the third deed in a series, which gives the mortgagee
possession and the entire produce, the landlord merely retaining the pro-
prietary title and power to redeem ; " even the soil itself might drfop away
from the owner of a janmam holding, and yet leave him as completely as
before the janmi of the whole of it." 3 The Otti is also described as a

1 Commentary, p. 100. 2 Mylasa (ante, p. 437), 24, 70.

3 Malabar, vol. i. p. 607.

572 FROM MASSALIA TO MALABAR.

usufructuary mortgage, the interest on which almost, if not quite, extinguishes
the usufruct, so that only a peppercorn rent is reserved to the mortgagor.1
It differs from the " ploughshare pledge " in that it may have the character
of an hypothecatory rather than a usufructuary mortgage, it being not essen-
tial to a kanam mortgage for possession to pass to the mortgagee.

Mr. Logan's view is that the janmi was never absolute lord of the soil,
but that the military caste was paid for its services in the field by the
concession of the right to levy land tax from certain estates ; and that it
was this right, and this right only, that the lord of the jenm could mort-
gage. On the other hand, it could never have occurred to a feudal
warrior to mortgage the feudal rights, — which he was obviously unable to
sell, while the military tenure was a reality, — unless the idea of raising
money in this way upon inalienable property had been reached before-
hand. In Malabar we see the adaptation to a feudal state of the anti-
chretic mortgage invented in a commercial state ; and, as the feudal
fighting element subsided into peaceful agricultural life, a system of
permanent, customary tenancy seems to have grafted itself upon the feudal
adaptation of the primitive method of pledging or exchanging the use of
land for that of money.

M. Dareste's comment on certain Greek leases executed in the form of
mortgages might therefore well be applied to the men of Malabar : " On
voit cornbien les Grecs etaient ingenieux pour trouver des combinaisons
de formes juridiques adaptees aux besoins economiques de leur vie
sociale." The combinations to which he refers were, however, effected at

1 Commentary, p. 95.

Visscher's account of the matter is quite consistent with the above, but may be worth
reprinting, because the slight variations in it may represent varieties of usage prevailing
in different times or localities.

(1) There is the complete sale called AH Palta, which does not often take place ; when
a person resigns all right over a garden or estate which he has sold, and the formulary
of this deed runs thus : that he renounces stone and mud, splinters and thorns, snakes,
great and small, and everything within the four corners of the estate to him and to his
successors. If the estate is situated on the river bank, the number of feet to which it
extends in the water is also certified.

(2) There is a mode of loan called Patta, which is very common and can only be ex-
plained by an example. Thus supposing a man has a garden worth 10,000 fanams, he
sells it for 8,000 or 9,000 fs., retaining for the remainder of the value the right to the
proprietorship of the estate ; for these 1,000 or 2,000 fanams the purchaser must pay an
annual interest. If the seller wishes at the end of some years to buy back his estate, he
must restore the 8,000 or 9,000 fanams, and in addition the sum of money which shall
have been fixed by men commissioned to value the improvements made upon the pro-
perty in the interim, by fresh plantations of coca-palms or other fruit-trees. But if the
purchaser or tenant become weary of the estate, and wishes to force it back on the
original possessor, he can do so only at a loss of 20 per cent.

(3) Berampatta is a complete lease similar to those which take place among us.

(4) Kararna is a species of exchange : one man lends a garden to another, worth, for
instance, 6 ooo fanams, and borrows that sum, in return, for an appointed term of years,
during which the fruits of the garden serve as interest.

(5) Mirpatta : a landlord gives to some individual a piece of waste land for building
or planting with coco-palms, and receives no interest for it till the trees are so high that
a Carnak, sitting on an elephant, can reach a leaf of them with his stick. A small
sum of money is, however, paid beforehand for the use of the land. When the trees
have attained the height above mentioned, the garden is taxed according to its value, and,
rent paid accordingly. — Letters from Malabar, p. 72.

MALABAR. 573

the Carian town of Mylasa, and their invention may now, perhaps, be
attributed to the earlier inhabitants of the country. The most character-
istic deed x is one by which the treasurers of a tribe buy a man's land and
then let it to him and his heirs for ever. There are separate acts for the
sale and the lease, and it is stipulated that the holding must not be divided
or transferred without the consent of the proprietors. Practically, as
M. Dareste remarks, " the vendor, who takes a lease of the land he has
sold, borrows on mortgage, and the purchaser acquires a ground rent."
But such leases were most commonly granted in the case of city or temple
property, and the gradual disuse of private contracts of the kind seems to
show that they did not meet any special economic want in the social life
of Greece. The normal term for a lease of sacred lands was ten years,
and the farmer was allowed to renew for a second term at an advance of
10 per cent.,2 and Malabar analogies help to explain or interpret both
these incidents.

On any change of succession to the janmam the loan was either reduced
in amount by 13 per cent., or a corresponding payment (not added to the
debt) was made to the janmi, like a fine for the renewal of a lease. But
unless the relation was advantageous to both parties, of course the tenant
mortgagee would not pay the fine, though it appears in most cases that this
class now depends for its well-being upon the customary right of renewal
at the old rate. The English Government unfortunately seems to have
begun by renewing the mistake made in the case of the Zemindars, and
treated the janmis as absolute owners of the soil, with the result that the.
Mapillas both revolted and formulated the maxim : " It is no sin, but a
merit, to kill a janmi who evicts."

Major Walker, however, looked upon the landowners as the victims of
their astute tenants, and observed: "The Mapillas, who have a greater
command of cash than any other class, are constantly on the watch to take
advantage of the wants and the indiscretion of the original proprietors ; "•
and he accuses that "crafty people" of unfair tricks, favoured by the
absence of publicity for the transactions in question.

The value of land, to pledge or mortgage, was ascertained in the same
kind of way, and with the same regard to local custom, as its letting
value. The jenm right was always, according to Major Walker, estimated
at half the real worth of the estate, or one-third of its selling price. The
rent paid by an occupying mortgagee, in the example he gives,3 is only
5 per cent, on the value of the land without the jenm. He takes the
case of a paramba or property worth 1,500 fanams, mortgaged for 1,000
fanams, i.e. its full value less the jenm rights. The mortgagee must not
sell his rights for more than he gave for them, or in any way alter the
terms of the tenancy, because this impairs the owner's rights. The
jenmkar by this deed (kayividu otti) cedes his right to reclaim the land
on repayment at will, but he has the first right of redemption. He, or

1 Doc. jur. Grecques, pt. ii. p. 272.

2 Ib., p. 265 : query a fine of ^ or one year's rent? 3 Report, p. i.

574 FROM ]\t ASS ALIA TO MALABAR.

any one else, on redeeming the tenant right, has to pay for all improve-
ments, including the planting of trees ; and it is said that tenants who
expect to be disturbed sometimes plant a number of young trees merely in
order to be paid for them as an improvement.

If the owner wants to sell his remaining rights, he must give the first
offer to his tenant creditor ; and if the latter does not buy, he must
surrender the land, that the lord may sell it, with all its rights, to some one
else and pay off the mortgage out of the price. If the transfer of the
jenmkar's rights is to proceed further, the next step is for him to execute
two further deeds, each of which conveys an additional 20 per cent,
of the whole value of the jenm ; the first of these has the effect of making
the tenant participate in the jenm rights — of which the chief, it seems,
were the right to fell trees and to burn or bury corpses on the land ; that
is to say, the consent of both the landlord and tenant is required to either
of these acts of sovereignty. When the second payment is received
{raising the mortgage to 1,400 fanams), seven-eighths of the jenmkar's
rights belong to the tenant, who may burn and bury at discretion, though
the right of felling trees is still divided. After this the owner can only
redeem if the tenant offers to let him. The last remaining 100 fanams
of the price of the property is transferred, incidentally, in the course of
the final sale or attipet ola ; but the next heir can forbid the sale, and is
not obliged to assign any reason for doing so.

When the primary object of the transaction is the granting of a lease to
a cultivator, the kancuu or pledge amounted by custom to two years' rent,
the rent being estimated as already described. The kanam bears interest
(at 5 or 7 per cent.), which the tenant deducts from his rent, as long
as he pays th-it punctually. If the landowner's object is to raise money
rather than to let his land, the kanam may be any sum short of the full
value of the property ; and if it is large, the interest eats up the rent, as in
the typical Babylonian deeds.

Sir George Campbell1 describes the surrender of the use of land in
other parts of India, or a sort of vifgage, without specified limit of time,
as the common resort of embarrassed owners to whom the idea of an ab-
solute sale or surrender of land is unknown or unacceptable, but then it
is the actual cultivator who appears as debtor or borrower ; whereas in
Egypt and Malabar this state of things is reversed, and the tenant culti-
vator lends on mortgage to his landlord.

The feudal character of the jenmkar's right betrays itself by its resem-
blance to the periodical demands of the feudal superior in mediaeval
Europe. The jenmkar was entitled on the renewal of the kanam to a
remission of a fixed percentage on the original loan, so that, in course of
time, the lease naturally fell in, unless the person in succession preferred
levying a money fee instead of granting a renewed lease with a reduced
kanam. But the agreement by which the creditor, in course of time, auto-
matically paid himself off, gave the landlord and his heirs a never-ceasing

1 Colnicn Club Essays, Systems of Land Tenure in Different Countries ; p. 232.

MALABAR, 575

interest in the jenm. They never ceased to be able either to borrow
money on the security of their land, or to let it at the rent which repre-
sented the pad's share of the produce.

If the tenant wished to surrender, he was required to forfeit 10 or 20
per cent, of his original advance. If the extravagance or necessities of
the proprietors led them to go on borrowing, instead of allowing the mort-
gages to pay themselves off — as occurred in many cases — the result was
for the interests of the mortgagee to become stronger than those of the
proprietor. And one reason for believing the whole system to have grown
out of the landlordship of the Tarwads is, that joint owners are much
likelier to have acquiesced in such a development than private freeholders.

Formerly, the kanam tenant might be evicted on the charge of misusing
the land, or if his loan was paid off, and he himself compensated for all
unexhausted improvements; but this theoretical right was practically never
exercised. When the temptation arose to evict merely for the sake of
obtaining a higher kanam from some land-hungry competitor, the English
courts, after a time, came to the rescue, by setting up a customary right
on the part of the mortgagee to hold for twelve years without disturbance,
as the counterpart to the janmi's right to demand a fine on renewal at
the same interval. They have also, with difficulty, been prevailed on to
rule that mere non-payment of rent is not a ground for eviction, because
the mortgagor has the remedy of letting the arrears accumulate till the
period of redemption, and can then set off the arrears of rent against the
kanam and compensation for improvements.

The rights of the mortgagor in these tenancies are to redeem at the end
of the term on payment of what is due, to receive rent as it becomes due,
or deduct it from the kanam at time of redemption, and to create a mel-
kanam or higher mortgage, if he pleases. The rights of the mortgagee are
to assign his term ; to foreclose, or at least to sue, and then attach and sell
the equity of redemption ; and to claim compensation for unexhausted
improvements at the period of redemption.

Akin to the Otti is the Peruvartham, under which land is mortgaged for
its full market value, and can be redeemed only on the same terms, the
tenant claiming the " unearned increment," if any. Mr. Krishna Menon
suggests that Kaividuga £>///( = that has slipped out of one's hand) indi-
cates that the equity of redemption is lost, but if the mortgagee wishes to
sell, he is bound to give the option of purchasing to the jenmkar on repay-
ment of the original advance. There are various stages reducing the
owner's interest to a mere name between the otti and the final sale or
Atti-pet, upon which the law concentrates all its formalities.

To give validity to such a deed of sale, according to Vyavahara Samud-
ram, a law book (like those of the Mazaceni) in verse, " There should be
six persons present : viz. people of pure caste, relations, a son, the scribe
of the king, and people connected with the parties. Unless those here
mentioned are present, no portion of land must be bought." Major
Walker paraphrases this : one of the caste of the jenmkar (the person sell-

576 FROM MASS A LI A TO MALABAR.

<£>

ing), one of his near kindred, the heir, a person on behalf of the sovereign,

the person who draws out the deed, and the Deshawali, the chief of the
village or district. It is thus not any special disability of the Karnavan, or
elder, that he cannot sell without the presence or assent of the eldest
Anandravan, who is at once relative and heir. In Ceylon land might not
be sold without notice being given to heirs or partners or neighbours
who had adjacent land or held mortgages on that for sale, all such parties
having a right of pre-emption.

Sales by a debtor, or from husband to wife, or father to son, are always
viewed with suspicion. And the relation between the karnavan and his
anandravans is so like that of the Cretan father and husband to the " be-
longings," that we can easily understand how laws came to be made in
restriction of gifts to wives and daughters. The stringency with which the
joint ownership of tarwad land has been kept up has perhaps rather
favoured the growth of private property in other directions. The karnavan
never even proposes to appropriate for the family the separate acquisitions
or earnings of the juniors. All such acquisitions remain at the absolute
disposal of the individual during his life, though it is said that in practice
most men divide their earnings between their own family (of wife and
children) and the tavali or tarwad, which includes their mother and
sisters — the relatives whom Barbosa describes the Nairs of his day as
supporting "with what they gain." Self-acquired land lapses to the
tarwad if not disposed of during life, but other property goes to the ac-
quirer's heirs, i.e. normally to his nephews. It is therefore especially the
junior members of the tarawads engaged in productive pursuits, who are
interested in the reform of the present law of marriage and inheritance.

• & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.

301

v.l

Simcox, Edith Jemima
Primitive civili-
zations

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